Every time I saw Ashley Fletcher play he impressed me. But he only ever started a game twice, I think. And therein lies the problem. If you don’t get game time, you’re unlikely to hit the net very often. Too often for Ashley Fletcher it was five minutes here, ten minutes there.
At the end of last season Bilic played Calleri in every game, yet Ashley Fletcher barely got a lookin. It didn’t take Einstein to work out which was the better player.
So today we’ve sold him to Middlesborough for £7 million. We ended up paying Manchester United £1 million for him last season, so not a bad profit! You have to say that’s a good deal for us and if we’re honest it’s a good deal for Ashley Fletcher. It’s a lot of money for an unproven striker, but he may well do very well in the Championship and I think we all wish him well.
So we now have three frontline strikers – Hernandez, Carroll and Sakho. I suspect that £7 million may well be used to buy a fourth striker. That man is tipped to be Burnley’s Andre Gray. He’s not a player I want to see at West Ham for footballing and non footballing reasons. Yes, he scored a lot of goals towards the end of last season, but during the whole season he only scored 9 in 32 Premier League games. To me he seems like a Championship player who isn’t quite up to the standard of the Premier League. If we do sign him, I hope he proves me wrong.