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Barry, Benitez and O'Neill - Episode 942 E-mail
Friday, 04 July 2008
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Barry difficult situation
There seems to be no end to the transfer issue of Aston Villa captain Gareth Barry. This epic drama of which Liverpool seemed to want to bid for the English players started before the season ended and with the new season coming up, it seems that the story still goes on. To begin with, Liverpool has already made their fourth bid after having the first three turned down. And all parties involved in this transfer seemed to be annoying each other for the sake of annoying each other. They should just do business, and leave it to that. Liverpool coach Rafael Benitez, has since annoyed Villa boss Martin O’Neill, who in return has annoyed Barry for having time to talk on TV but not time to ask him to stay, who seemed to have annoyed O’Neill and fined him 100,000 pounds and banning him from attending pre-season training, which annoys Barry, who seemed most likely to leave Villa after this episode. Benitez, has launched the latest bid to secure Barry’s move to Anfield with the latest being £15million and another £3million depending on the club’s performance is still not what Villa wants. Rafa has since challenged O’Neill to meet that price, after all, Barry is set on leaving. O’Neill announced “Gareth has made his position clear and after that it is straightforward. We have put a valuation on him and Liverpool value him differently at the moment. That is what the stalemate is, it is nothing else. Gareth has pointed out he wants to go and if Liverpool come up and meet our valuation, he will go. That has been the case since the beginning of June when Gareth said he definitely wanted to go to Liverpool. We put a valuation on him and we have based this valuation on a number of straightforward issues, not least that he is actually a top-quality player.”

O’Neill who has since banished Barry from training would have by now accepted the reality that his captain is poised to go, but perhaps just to make things harder than it seems. He said “When somebody says they want to leave a football club, there is not much else you can do about it. We had a meeting a few weeks before that, (owner) Randy (Lerner), myself, Gareth and his agent and he said that Champions League football was what he wanted to do. So this idea that we have not done anything in our power to keep him, I am afraid I totally and utterly disagree. Why on earth would we not want to keep our very top player at the football club when we're trying to improve? I think we have made steady improvement, we have gone from 16th to 11th to sixth in the league. This season we are going to try to push on from there. So the one thing you want to do is keep your best players.”

 
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