• City manager confident of signing ‘Mr Chelsea’
• Terry thought to favour a change of scenery
Mark Hughes broke his silence on the John Terry affair today to speak of his confidence that the England captain wanted to join Manchester City and publicly question whether the man who has portrayed himself as Mr Chelsea needed “a change of scenery” for the good of his own career.
Hughes described Terry as an “outstanding player and an outstanding person” and made it clear that City had targeted him because they had received information that he was agitating to leave Stamford Bridge. The City manager accepted there were some players in the world, such as Steven Gerrard and Lionel Messi, who could never be persuaded to leave their clubs but argued that Terry did not fall into that category and painted a picture of the 28-year-old beginning to feel stale at the place where he has spent his entire career.
“We would like to think we could offer John a different challenge,” Hughes said. “He’s been at Chelsea a long time and I know from my own experience as a player that when you have been with a club for a long time you get to a point when you think you need a new challenge and that a change of scenery would re-ignite certain things within you.
“It is not a question of finance, or money, it is about a different challenge, and John being at a different stage in his life and his career, and maybe that is why there hasn’t been a response [to commit himself to Chelsea] because John is seriously thinking in those terms. I went through that process myself as a player and I can understand if that is the way he is thinking.”
Those remarks will inevitably go down badly at Stamford Bridge at a time when Chelsea are aggressively trying to repel City’s advances and have not wavered from their public stance that Terry is not available at any price. Hughes, however, felt sufficiently emboldened to question whether Terry recognised City were “on the cusp of something” and he was speaking from a position of strength after several months of detailed inquiries behind the scenes to ascertain the defender’s exact position.
The last message Hughes received was on Monday morning when he was reliably informed that Terry wanted, if possible, to leave Chelsea in as dignified a way as possible but that, were it necessary, he was also willing to force through a move. City’s information, as revealed by the Guardian in February, is that he has become disillusioned about Chelsea’s perceived lack of ambition in the transfer market and the frequency with which the club have changed managers. Information has also reached City that he has difficulties with several other members of the dressing room and, as Hughes indicated, that he feels like his career needs a new challenge. The huge sums of money on offer cannot be overlooked, with City willing to make him the highest-paid player in the Premier League on around £250,000 a week.
City have spent £54m on Carlos Tevez, Roque Santa Cruz and Gareth Barry this summer and Hughes’s spending will go through the £200m mark if, as expected, the club complete the £25m signing of Emmanuel Adebayor today. The fee has been agreed but Adebayor has asked for permission to sleep on it. The Togo international is worried how the move would be perceived in Africa but Hughes is confident of getting his man. “It’s well documented that we moved away from Samuel Eto’o and decided we wanted Adebayor, and it’s quite close.”
City’s next move will be to inform Chelsea they are willing to pay in excess of £30m for Terry. On two separate occasions Hughes pointedly described Terry as being a Chelsea player “at this moment in time” and the manager added: “We know there are other areas of the team we need to address now. We’ve made an offer to Chelsea and I’ve made my feelings known in terms of my respect for John Terry. I think he’s an outstanding player and an outstanding person. I’ve thought that since I first met him when he was a young boy at Chelsea and I was a player there, and if the opportunity has presented itself to bring a player of that calibre to the club we will try our hardest to do it. We’ve already had conversations with Chelsea to that regard and we would like the opportunity to speak to John Terry now.”
