Pompey Close In On Crouch
Portsmouth have had a £10 million bid for Peter Crouch accepted according to a report in the Daily Mail. After having a previous bid turned down, Pompey have met Liverpool’s valuation of the player and appear to have seen off Tottenham in the race for striker’s signature. The deal for Crouch is expected to be completed on Monday.
This is an interesting one for fantasy managers. When Crouch gets games, he can often produce the goods and with Defoe as his foil, goals and assists should be plentiful. Crouch’s value across the various games will be worth watching now. We’ve already seen him priced at 8.0 in the Fantasy Premier League game today, a price which puts him in the same bracket as Yakubu and Agbonlahor. That’s a pretty fair assessment of his potential but I can personally see him outscoring the pair of them if Harry can provide him some service from wide areas.
How early were you up Scouting the papers! I’d love Crouch to partner Defoe, I could see them being a big threat to defences. Who will provide for them though….
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Reply by Brad on July 5, 2008 7:39 am:
I am torn - although i’d love to see Crouch get more of a chance at another club (and i think he’d really shine at Pompey), this trade would significantly reduce the chances of Liverpool completing a cash + player swap for Keane.
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Reply by Verbal on July 5, 2008 8:19 am:
Why was he not given more of a chance at Liverpool? Was it just that Rafa didn’t like/rate him or was it that, despite his decent goals to games ratio, he didn’t offer much else? I’ve always rated him and would even have considered him Englands first choice had he had more regular starts at Liverpool.
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Reply by Brad on July 5, 2008 8:35 am:
Good question. I’d say that it was more a situation where Rafa just couldn’t work out an effective way to fit him into the team’s overall game plan (i.e. a preference to play Gerrard very high almost as a second striker & the success of playing Torres on his own up front).
It seems that one of the downsides of having so much money being thrown around the league is that more and more top quality players (who would easily feature in 95% of the world’s teams) are unable to get a start - just ask Shevshenko and Sidwell sitting on the bench over at Chelsea.
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