It has been pure popcorn.
Glad Tolmie called their bluff.
Never met the fella or his brother, despite obviously knowing many mutual people, but he has good standing and is time served.
If Ric stands firmly beside him then he is gold. There is no better reference than that.
Why should he sit back and let blaggers and chancers take money out of his pocket? This is his job.
For those who think ‘professional’ journalists don’t steal stuff from forums and Twitter, you are disastrously incorrect. That is increasingly all they do, in fact.
I know. I have seen it first hand.
Ornstein was cited earlier in this thread as an exemplar. Wrong.
He basically has an ‘in’ with one agent, Barnett, but the industry is a village so he will occasionally get to hear a bit of the village’s second hand gossip.
He’s not far off Castles, tbf, whose credibility is so irreparably damged that he is now considered unemployable on staff in England.
That’s why he relentlessly plugs his ‘transfer podcast’ with the old soak Nixon. It’s a clickbait scam.
Instead, Castles is little more than a “useful idiot” and instrument of Mendes’ third/fourth string guy. He doesn’t even have a direct line to the main man ffs, yet was still willing to debase himself with increasingly deranged Mourinho worship, to try and ingratiate himself with the Big Boss.
But he still has a couple of mates on the industry desks who will throw him a sympathy commission now and again.
Who knows? Maybe they also have an embarrassing liverpool taxi story they would rather nobody ever knows about?
Tl:dr: I’ll side with a Moss Side lad over spoofers like Romano, Castles, Ornstein any day of the week