Fletcher Ready For The Flak
Last updated : 17 August 2006 By Covsupport
Coventry City Managing Director Paul Fletcher has said that he is ready to take the flak for the decision to sell Gary McSheffrey to Birmingham City.
It was a decision that provoked rumour and counter- rumour of what the reason was. These included McSheffrey being sold so the club could make a bank repayment at the end of August whilst another was that season ticket sales and PSL targets had not been achieved and the club had no choice but to cash in when the price they wanted or McSheffrey was reached by Birmingham City.
Fletcher said to the CET: "I won't be shying away from it.. "I'm quite happy to take the flak because I take all the smiles and all the praise when people think that things are going well, so it's only right that I stand up to be counted when people object to some of the things we do. "I understand why some fans are very, very angry at the situation but in the course of any season players come in and players go out. All we can ask is that people judge us on our league position at the end of the season."
He added: "This was a very complex situation: it isn't normal for a club to come five times for the same player. "What I can't do, unfortunately, is to go through every single line of the deal with every single fan. When I do have the opportunity to talk to fans, and tell them the exact situation, suddenly it clicks.
"Three fans rung me to make that point and at the end of our conversation every one of them said 'now we know the background, we think you made the right decision."
"There has to be a process, which can break down at a number of stages, and we've followed that process. It doesn't become a deal until two groups of people sign a paper, and that certainly didn't happen on Tuesday night.
"People on both sides can change their minds at the last minute. There comes a moment in time when a deal's a deal, and in this particular case that didn't happen until we announced it.
"We made some transfer inquiries when we knew there was a chance of this deal coming off but before anything had been announced," he said. "We wanted to see what value clubs had put on various players, because the moment that people think you've got £4million to spend, everybody's price goes up by 25 per cent."
