Northern Git You dont have to be polite mate, its just the way I feel it is. Are you really telling me an offer (at or about his value) will be turned down? Wish I had your faith, and will be happy to hold my hands up and say I was wrong if (when) any such offer is turned down and the club issue a statement he is not for sale as we are building the team round him.
Opps sorry just re read your post - did you mean that the bit about McDermott, fellow players (OK perhaps not Church), us fans or Long himself was incorrect?
Thing is it's not about RFC deciding to sell, it's about clubs wanting to buy and making offers at, or above, a value that the club will have in their heads for the player....
Put yourself in the clubs shoes for a moment. Let's say a club, perhaps Newcastle, comes along and offers £8M for Long - for a striker that's done the business for only the last six months or so that's very strong money - so what do the club do?
Long's made no secret of the fact he'd love to play in the PL, and it's not like he won't be aware of the offer - all that has to happen is someone from NUFC drop his agent a text, the message will get through.
So what do you propose the club do? Turn down the offer out of hand? Given that he wants to play in the PL that could lead to a very unhappy player, and I suspect an unhappy Long would be unlikely to produce the goods on the pitch given that one of his key strengths is his work rate.
The only other option is to put the offer to the player, at which point the matter is pretty much out of the clubs hands - it's Longs decision to make, does he want to play in the PL, or stick with Reading for a while and take a chance on us?
A lot of people on here seem to think that Reading treat players as commodities, to be bought and sold at will - I don't believe that's the way it works at all, the players definitely have a say in what happens, at least they do while they're under contract....
Has anyone considered that the reason that McD seemed so pissed off after the Mills transfer might have been because Mills himself took the decision to go? Despite interest from other clubs Mills had verbally indicated that he intended to stay at Reading, Ingi and Kish were allowed to go (I guess with McD assuming he'd have Mills in the squad) then McD gets the news that Mills is off..... If Mills had indicated to me that he planned to stay, and I'd made some key decisions based on that, then he upped and left, I'd probably be a bit miffed.....
At the end of the day, most of what you see on here is hearsay and supposition - very few, if any on here have any idea what goes on behind closed doors at the club, however, one thing is certain; RFC is a business and is governed by business law - that means that the annual accounts have to be accurate, and they show that SJM hasn't taken any money out of the club whatsoever recently - anyone adopting a "where's the money gone" or "SJM is asset stripping the club" attitude really needs to grow up and live in the real World......
