being a cynical bastard, to me the intriguing thing about that story is

just who (or how many) in our set up and wider 'connections' owe more loyalty to other clubs than to us? Or at least, how many are willing to do favours for other clubs (even if there's no malicious intent, and the individual's only 'fault' is not disclosing that his own tip off was from another club with vested interests)?

Because the implication of Warnock's piece is either that:

(i) Warnock had an intermediary speak to us to 'sell' Becchio to us and we followed that up, and took a punt on a player who was otherwise not on our radar beforehand (so a panic buy and we cocked up); or

(ii) one of our network of scouts/connections who we trust was willing to tip a player at the request of Warnock, rather than because he necessarily thought Becchio was any good or would have tipped him without Warnock's involvement (so a conflict of interest we either ignored or weren't aware of).

At some point the due diligence process completely fell down on Becchio, because we seemed to have signed someone that Hughton doesn't rate highly enough/doesnt think is a good fit. Were we just panicking idiots, or did we place too much trust in someone with a conflict of interest?

When I read about the likes of Henning Berg doing ad hoc scouting for us, I have to wonder how many other ad hoc scouts we have out there and who else they are also scouting for when it's not us, and where true loyalties lie.

Ordinarily you'd think there would be too many people involved in assessing a player for the motives of the original tip to actually be relevant, but for some reason that doesn't seem to have been the case here. At best, it's either panic-buy ineptitude on our part (which I didn't think would ever be the case under McNally...) or we are just not a good enough judge of player ability. At worst, we have been properly done over by someone.

Posted By: CWC on November 29th 2013 at 13:03:34

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