Real Football Man All of the Football, All of the time
Everton are determined to hang on to the England defender John Stones after turning down a £20m bid from Chelsea.
Everton are understood to have responded to the bid for the 21-year-old, who is in Singapore with the club for the Barclays Asia Trophy, with a categoric rejection.
Stones, speaking earlier at a sponsor’s event, said: “I am very happy at Everton. My aim right now is to try to nail down a regular spot in this Everton team and hopefully that will take care of playing for England. I have to keep learning from the likes of Phil Jagielka and keep progressing at this club.”
Chelsea will make an improved £26million offer for Everton defender John Stones after the Blues’ initial bid of £20m was rejected.
Stones will be offered the No 6 shirt and Chelsea secretary David Barnard will meet with Everton officials as the champions look to broker a deal for the 21-year-old England international.
Everton, though, will demand a fee in excess of £30m should Stones indicate a willingness to move to Stamford Bridge – but are determined not to sell one of their most important assets.
Editor’s Note: Do Chelsea see John Stones as the heir apparent to John Terry. If he was to move this Summer would he be straight into the starting eleven or would he have to be prepared to spend a season on the bench while John Terry sees out the twilight of his career. What repercussions will this have for a potential starting place for England. I suppose the bigger question that needs to be asked is that, is it healthy to have the top 4/5 clubs in the country making up all the England squad. If a squad of 24 players is only being made up by a handful of clubs then they can’t all be playing each week.
Does this make a difficult job for Roy Hodgson even harder – already England players first team places at their respective clubs are up for grabs due to the wealth of international talent and I must stress this isn’t me being xenophobic or anything like that but if they are all just being hoovered by the big clubs then there isn’t an even spread of talent throughout the country in which to choose from and therefore some of these players may only be playing a handful of games while being called up for England.
What the answer to this I really don’t know, you can’t stop clubs from buying players unless we go down a quota route but I don’t think that’s a good idea and hopefully Greg Dyke puts that idea to sleep (whether he does or not is a different matter) but on the flip side it can’t be good for an international manager to see his call ups getting less and less game time. But then again maybe this just further serves that club Football and Champions League in particular is the dominant competition in today’s game
