If we want a quality player, we are just gonna have to spend some green - Theres no option imo. And especially in light of having spent a 23 million total on a less necessary Amauri, I would not forgive this board for letting a Xabi deal fall through because of a shortfall in the money they are willing to pay.
Forget that he's Interisti, getting Stank (who definately isnt as good imo and 4 years older too) as our supposed midfield missing puzzle piece would be nothing short of disaster. A guy like Stank isnt a player you can rely to build your midfield game around anymore. Hes good to have as back-up and thats about it for me
agree wholeheartedly. but still; we shouldn't act any worse than we are. Liverpool want this deal just as much as we do, so if everyone is willing to make an effort, we'll do it. Imagine we made a (verbal) deal with pool for 18mio, and all of a sudden, pool says they want 5mio more or something because he 'played at the euros'. Should this be the case, i think our board is right to turn that offer down. Either pool see what's going on, or we leave it. It's important that we don't just accept everything, because no matter how good he turns out to be, that's a whole lot of money for a non-starter-player (neither in pool, nor in spain nt). But don't get me wrong, i'm all for xabi, he'll probably JUST what we need, and i hope (and think) we'll make this deal!
But it's no use looking for scapegoats if this deal collapses - If pool or xabi are making trouble, then we HAVE to look for alternatives (alone for the fact to put pressure on them, it was so obvious that newspapers are full of rumours linking us with CMs).
Again; i don't want stankovic, and i believe xabi alonso would be one of the best midfielders available for our needs, but we HAVE to consider that stankovic will probably be 1/3 of xabi's price, with also something around 1/2 the salary. That's A LOT of money...