Liverpool are about to launch an alleged second bid for Nathaniel Clyne, but the fee that Brendan Rodgers is really just taking the proverbial.
even the most naive of football supporters appreciates that in any transfer negotiation there is an amount of bartering that goes on, the selling club will quote a grossly inflated fee and the buying club will come in low and eventually both parties will meet somewhere in the middle.
But if a transfer negotiation is to be conducted in a serious and businesslike manner then both parties have to be realistic.
That being the case no one was too surprised after last year's dealings with brendan Rodgers when it was leaked to the press that he had tabled a £10 million pound bid for Nathaniel Clyne, yes it was on the low mark being around half of Saints valuation of the player , but it was after all an opening bid and they are always taking the mickey a bit to test the water.
Given Rodgers penchant for conducting his transfer business using the media to spread unrest in a player it was no surprise that in the past week reports started to surface that Liverpool were about to come in again for Clyne with an improved offer.
A second offer is usually the more serious one, its showing that your ready to start talking real money and are not some 10 year old playing monopoly, but it seems that brendan Rodgers is more at home landing on Old Kent Road than he is in the real world.
The latest report is that Liverpool are upping their bid to a whopping £11 million, a massive increase of £1 million on their initial offer, do they think we are going to bite their hands off !!!
But although this is a derisory increase that we are going to turn downout of hand, the reality is that this is slightly sinister, a pattern is emerging after our dealings with Brendan Rodgers last summer and that pattern is that Small Time Brendan likes to conduct a campaign of unsettling his transfer targets in the media in the hope that the player will put pressure on his club to let him move to Liverpool even if it means a low fee.
We saw this with Adam Lallana last summer as Rodgers used the media to insinuate that he would change his transfer target elsewhere if Lallana was not sold quickly and hopefully cheaply to him and we saw it with Lovren whose head was in Liverpool long before they actually made a bid for him.
So this is another Brendan Rodgers plot, but he is on dodgy ground, firstly he is not the only option in the market as he was for Lallana and secondly Saints are better prepared this time, it could all backfire on Brendan if a more ethical manager comes in with a bid that is acceptable to Saints.
Secondly he is not the attraction that he was a year ago to a player, back then he could offer a move to a club that had just finished runners up and was in the Champions league, a year on Liverpool have gone backwards and so has Rodgers reputation, both as a manager and a person, but also inside the game he has the whispering going around that the Liverpool dressing room is not a harmonius place.
So Rodgers does not have the deck of cards that he had last summer and it seems that he has gained no knowledge or common sense in that time. Perhaps it will be attractive for a player to join a manager with a fast growing reputation for not being ethical or honest with his players, but he won't find many friends amid other Premier League clubs who are fed up with his underhand tactics.
So do one Brendan and come back when you are serious !