TBM Ian Royal was pretty confident it was a done deal
Ian Royal In all honesty I'm guessing there's a framework in place with some small room for maneuver depending on performance, and like pretty much anything, if someone wants to wreck it bad enough they'll manage it.
There's got to be a fee negotiated already and Murray is going to have a damn good idea of what we're going to pay him and for how long. So it's surely got to take something spectacular to not go through.
something spectacular like a change of manager and getting back into the PL playing squad of his club on his existing wage.
The argument from E-P was that anyone could just come in and gazump us and he's using the fact that we didn't get him in the end as some sort of trump that he was right about that all along. But that's not what happened. No one signed him. No one stepped in and gazumped us. He just stayed at Palace.
It's really not fecking hard and I don't understand why E-P, who's normally fairly bright is having so much trouble understanding quite basic concepts.
1. Plain Loan signing
We loan Murrary for 5 months, no other deals discussed.
End of 5 months. If we want him, we have to bid alongside any other club that wants him. wage expectations probably haven't been discussed at the loan deal stage.
2. Loan with an option to buy
We loan Murray for 5 months, with a deal agreed with
Palace that we can exercise a right to buy at a set price and another club can't intervene. We still have to sign a contract with Murray, but we can reasonably expect that most things have been discussed in terms of terms and aren't going to cause a problem.
End of 5 months we decide if we want to exercise the right to buy.
We do. The fee is already agreed. Palace put the option to Murray. They can either try and convince him to stay with them, or they can say off you pop, you're not really wanted. He then agrees terms with us, or refuses. If he refuses he then talks to Palace about his options and they either tell him to stay, or he's still not wanted. At which point other clubs may enter the process.
2. is what the club said we had, quite clearly. At the time it looked pretty obvious that if Murray did well we'd exercise the right to buy, Palace wouldn't be interested in keeping him and he'd have the choice of rotting in the reserves for half a year and then having no club, joining us, or gambling on someone else showing an interest.
As it transpired, Palace were oxf*rd for strikers and Murray was offered the chance of playing PL football with them on his existing salary, rather than rotting in the reserves. He made the obvious decision and we lost out.
What's so freaking hard to follow?
