nycanary 1 Posted January 24, 2006 All,Lots of extreme reactions regarding the Ashton sale. I justwatched him with a Hammers shirt and watched an entertaining and fluentWest Ham team defeat Fulham. I felt queasy, to put itlightly. But I think that EVERYONE is basically correct and itsjust a difference of which body organ you are thinking with -- yourheart or your mind. For me:HeartI hate seeing Deano go. I''m gutted. Thinking of him scoringfor the Hammers infuriates me. He''s going to be fantastic withthem and that feels awful. He should have been scoring thosegoals for us. We gave him his chance. He shouldn''t haveleft. The Board should never have allowed it and they misledus. How could Worthy do it? Who''s going to score for usnow? "Dean Ashton -- Future England Full International. Hisbest years came after he left Norwich." YUCK.MindTop piece of business for Norwich. 7 million for a player in theChampionship. Even Walcott went for 5 million initially and thatwas Rooney-esque fanaticism between Arsenal and Chelsea. MarcusBent for 2 million. Pandiani for 1 million. ClintonMorrison 1.1 million. Milan Baros 6.5 million (scored umpteentimes for his country). Kanoute for 4.4 million. Ellingtonfor 3 million. Henri Camara for 3 million. The list goeson. WE GOT SEVEN MILLION!! We doubled our money in 1 year. We did not lie to our supporters -- any idiot with two brain cells torub together can see that you HAVE to publicly talk the way our Boardand manager did to GET this type of price. If they followed someof the member''s of this Board''s PR advice, we''d have been lucky to get3 million. We were glad to keep Ashton in the summer but eventhen, if you were asked what would Ash do in the Jan window if Norwichwere not directly in the promotion frame, I bet most of us would admitthat he would want to go and we''d need to get the best price we couldfor him. Can you blame him for leaving? He gets no serviceand he''s not in the Prem. End of story. Given thecircumstances, I CONGRATULATE our Management for getting what we couldfor him. So, I''m torn about this. I hated seeing the #9 West Ham shirtwith Ashton emblazoned on it. But I must also concede that if theBoard makes the right moves in this window, then I think we may have aBETTER chance at promotion this season than if we hadn''t soldhim. No one player makes a team and we need many quality playersto get promoted and this money is what we need at this time. Thisis a good move for us. I congratulate the Board on this piece ofbusiness and wait and see what happens during the rest of the window. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites