Hucks or Ashton?

[BedsCanary 0]

Hypothetical one this. Liverpool come in with a £10,000,000 bid for Hucks during the transfer window. Man Utd offer £10,000,000 for Ashton. You must sell one player and one player only. Who would you have leave?

-note: this is completely hypothetical - no smug comebacks of "I wouldn''t sell either" or "I''d sell both" please!

[silver fox 0]

No doubt Huckerby.

[Northern Canary 0]

Huckerby.

[Trent Canary 0]

Huckerby, he''s older. If you altered the question slightly, to a 10Mil bid for Ashton and a 5Mil bid for Hucks I would be very hard pushed to make a choice.

[Syteanric 1]

Hucks, he is older and i think his days out wide are ending.. a more central role will no doubt beckon

jas :)

[no1canary 0]

providing ashton didn''t want to leave, i''d sell huckerby, no doubt about that. he''s now about 30. not as talented as ashton, even though effective. no contest imo.

[london Canary 0]

i''m not saying hucks isn''t still a very good player but if someone offered me 10mill for a 30year old huckerby i would bite their arm off!

[Huddy 0]

Its got to be huckerby, just because of his age. If  you asked who would you rather see leave it may be a trickier question.

[macdougalls perm 0]

Yeah, a much trickier question would be who would you rather see leave. Agreed. 

[chicken 0]

I think this a lot tougher than anyone is giving it credit for.

I wouldn''t be so quick to sell Huckerby - he is a player that has said he is happy to spend the rest of his carrear with Norwich City FC.

Now although yes he would easily be worth the ten million - I would say that Ashton is the same.

The only thing is we know that if we kept hold of Ashton it would be a matter of how long and more of a delaying the enevitable.

Should the worse case scenario happen and we get fail to get promotion this season how much longer would Ashton want to stay for? I think the real answer is we would probably sell both but not at once. We would sell Huckerby because of his age and the fact that he is worth £2 mil tops. But then depending on what would happen come the summer I think Ashton may go as well.

Now I said this a couple of seasons ago about Green and I will stick my neck out and say the same about Ashton.

I don''t think he is likely to go anywhere untill the summer. There are so many reasons why so I will try and sum it up a little and explain later if people don''t understand.

If Ashton were to go to a prem club now for the reason of chasing an england place it would be to heavy a risk.

Sure it would be great for him to play in a world cup - but should he turn in a bad game there with few friendlies as a warm-up he could be seen as the next Andy Cole more than the next Alan Shearer.

He is far better off moving in the summer and fighting his way into the post world cup team where the expectation of the players may well be less and where he will be able to play in more friendlies and qualifiers prior to any tournemant. I should emagine that being a part of the under 21 set up means that he is not wholly out of the picture when it comes to the world cup squad anyway with Bent being slightly ahead of him.

Then there is the January window itself. Its literally the bargin sales. Players that are out of contract in the summer attracting early interest to prevent other teams from getting them, equally the players in those positions making themselves available for transfer as they get a large cut of the deal.

Then there are the clubs buying out of desperation rather than squad building. Any team within ten points of relegation in the premiership can not be seen as safe and does Ashton really want to go to another club where he could end up in a similar situation to this season? I think not.

So as we have found out with Wigan, who have reportedly been put off by a high asking price, I think the player himself would actually be happy to stay at Norwich until the summer when clubs are more settled and where he can get a pre-season to settle in.

Its better for NCFC as well as clubs are in a better situation to count the costs when it comes to transfer money in the summer than they are in January. In fact I think most koffers in January are determined by how much has been spent in the previous summer.

Ashton knows he is good enough for a top 8 prem team. I could name about four or five teams he would walk into out of that lot at the moment! Here is the top 8:

Chelsea

Man U

Liverpool

Totenham

Wigan

Arsenal

Bolton

Man City

I think the only teams in there that are not crying out for more strikers are Liverpool and Totenham.

In 9th and tenth spot you have West Ham and Newcastle.

When you look at that you have to think that other than perhaps Wigan (if the rumours are to be believed) most of those teams have the spending power to afford an asking price of £7.5 million.

The alternatives last year were Crouch and Johnson. Both players that I class as a bit one dimensional - especially Johnson who is more of a Vassel than an Owen.