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We're all scared to sell our best, admits West Brom director Richard Garlick

Richard Garlick admits Albion and other Premier League clubs are far more ‘scared’ to sell players now because replacements are too expensive.

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Albion kept hold of in-demand skipper Jonny Evans this summer. (AMA)

The Baggies kept hold of Jonny Evans and Nacer Chadli in the transfer window because no club matched their valuation of either player.

Albion rejected several bids for skipper Evans, including an £18m offer from Manchester City and a £23m approach from Leicester.

They weren’t the only club to stand firm over selling in a summer where Liverpool, Arsenal and Southampton all rejected bids for their best stars too.

Albion’s director of football administration says the stratospheric transfer fees makes trading your best players extremely risky – because there’s no point ending the window with money in the bank and no replacement on the pitch.

“Because of the size of the transfer fees that were flying around, everybody’s a bit scared,” he admitted. “You hold onto what you’ve got because you know what you’ve got, as opposed to selling.

"Tottenham famously did it with (Gareth) Bale – they sold him and brought in seven players. It wasn’t like another Gareth Bale came in, having that money doesn’t necessarily help.

“Clubs have decided that they’ll stick with what they know unless they can get a good offer, a fair offer for market value.

“And they need to know they can replace, and that it’s early enough on in the window to integrate that player in.”

Garlick was part of the transfer committee that helped oversee what looks like a successful window for the Baggies.

And he revealed that each summer typically has three stages. Albion have often infuriated fans by failing to get business done early, but as Garlick explains, it is rarely that simple.

“There’s three stages to every transfer window,” he said. “There are the deals you can get done at the start, and those deals are the selling club wants to sell, the player wants to come, and the buying club wants to buy.

"That’s why Jay Rodriguez landed on July 1st. It was very simple, he wanted to come, they (Southampton) were prepared to sell him, we wanted to buy him, everybody wanted to make that deal happen.

“Then you run through to the brinkmanship – the club doesn’t really want to sell, it slows down.

"They are hostile transfers, the clubs are entrenched, player says ‘I want to leave’, club says 'you’ve got a five year contract', or whatever the scenario is.

“Then you run into the final two weeks and everybody starts thinking that deadline is looming, we better start getting a move on.

“That will always be the same whether you put the deadline at the end of September or start of August, you will always have that pattern.

“You have a plan much earlier than the end of May,” he revealed. “Going through spring time you know what you want to do. But the best laid plans rarely survive the first engagement.

“That information that you’ve got is not always quite right, perhaps the club don’t actually want to sell, if they do they want to sell for a different price.

"You have to go through that circus of getting players in, but it changes, it evolves, and I don’t see that changing.”