Alan Pardew is fighting to keep Newcastle United’s resident left-back, but could that cause more problems than it would solve?
Alan Pardew is allegedly still ‘fighting’ to keep Jose Enrique at Newcastle but I do wonder if it’s worth the bother. Pardew said:
“I keep looking at him and smiling, hoping he is going to stay. He smiles but hasn’t signed a contract yet. He was terrific against Fiorentina and showed why I want to keep him.”
I must admit if Alan Pardew kept smiling at me I’d be keen to find the exit and probably phone the police too, but that’s besides the point.
This is speculation on my behalf but I get the impression that Enrique can either take or leave Newcastle and that the only reason he won’t leave is if he doesn’t get a better offer from somewhere else.
Now, I’m a realist and I think the days are just about gone where football players have much in the way of ‘devotion’ to a club, so I’m not knocking him in terms of that. What worries me is that we get into next season without a contract having been signed and then he ends up going on a free next summer. (more…)
With Enrique looking more and more destined to leave Newcastle United as each day passes and with Neil Taylor signing a new deal at Swansea, the left-back situation is now a priority for the club.
Newcastle are now pretty much resigned to the fact that they’ll have to hunt for a new left-back before the summer’s out. It seems fairly odds-on now that Jose Enrique will leave and last week Alan Pardew said:
“The noises coming out of Jose’s camp are that he wants to get a new club playing Champions League football.
“We cannot offer him that at the moment, so that seems to be his focus. Hopefully that will change. It is a moving feast. We have got to be ready because if he goes, it is going to leave a big hole in the team and we need to fill it quickly. But he does travel to the United States with us.
“It is not ideal for us, as you can imagine. It is difficult. We have offered him a massive contract for this football club and he does not seem to want to sign it, so it is a very difficult position.
“We have had no concrete offers, but we are going to try and have contingency plans in place so that if we do lose X, then Y comes in.
“We are going to have to give ourselves some sort of chance, so that the deadline-day struggle we had after selling Andy Carroll does not happen again. We not want to be in the same position as last time.” (more…)