ToffeeBlue said:
Yet another comical bid from Citeh and rejected again. C'mon lads if your actually serious about JL at least put a bid in we are not going to laugh at. Perhaps the ITK's will tell you he has put yet another transfer request in! LOL
He
hasn't put in a transfer request, however he
has expressed a serious interest in joining City. In my opinion if he really wants to join us then he's going to have to force the issue with Everton himself which may well involve him putting in a transfer request in the near future. At the moment Everton can simply reject the bids, once he's requested to go it puts them in a slightly less secure position. Yes, they can still reject the bids but that leaves them with a player who doesn't want to be there anymore and is going to be getting more and more frustrated with Everton's stance.
Personally I think Lescott has an absolute ceiling in terms of value at £20m. He's a defender who doesn't play for one of the "big 4", he doesn't have Champion's League experience, he doesn't have any trophies in his cabinet and he's only got a small number of international caps. If we can get Tevez and Adebayor for £25m a piece then, with the removal of dark blue tinted glasses, every Everton fan has to see Lescott shouldn't be commanding that kind of money. We should bid £20m and, if Everton reject it, move on.
It's pretty clear to me that Lescott will
never command a £20m fee again, his value now is at it's highest (based on age, length of contract, the financial backing of the only club bidding for him etc). If we move on to another target (and believe me we
won't have all our eggs in one basket here, Terry decided to stay at Chelsea, within a matter of days we'd signed Toure) then so be it, Everton are the club that will end up with a disgruntled player who, in all likleyhood, will look to run down his contract and leave for a smaller fee next summer or the one after.
Can Everton really afford to turn their noses up at £20m? Ok, they're hardly paupers and Moyes seems to run a fairly tight financial ship, but the opportunity to cash in
big time on Lescott simply has to be too good to pass up. With Moyes' transfer history just think what he can do with £20m, he'll likely replace Lescott with an "up and coming" player and still have most of the fee left to strengthen elsewhere. I really don't see the logic in turning these bids down, and I certainly don't see the logic in Evertonians being
happy that the bids are rejected. The money will be worth more to the first team squad than Joleon Lescott is, of that I'm certain.
