Injured Sturridge has cost West Brom £50,000 a minute
Pardew defends signing Liverpool striker on loan He’s been serious loss to the team, says manager
Daniel Sturridge has cost West Bromwich Albion a staggering £50,000 a minute since his January loan move, but manager Alan Pardew has defended the signing of the Liverpool striker.
Struggling West Brom paid £3.8 million to land the England international but he has played only 77 minutes and the deal is under increasing scrutiny after he was ruled out of the next two matches – against Burnley today and Swansea next weekend.
The 28-year-old moved to the Hawthorns in a bid to revive his hopes of playing at the World Cup but those chances are now over. Pardew’s recruitment of Sturridge, who suffered from persistent injury problems at Liverpool, was seen as a huge boost in West Brom’s fight for survival, after scrapping bids for Watford’s Troy Deeney and Islam Slimani of Leicester City.
But Sturridge has not played since coming off in the fourth minute of the 3-0 defeat at Chelsea in February and the deal appears a gamble that has badly backfired.
“You’re in a transfer window when Premier League clubs release players because they’ve got injury records or are not in good form,” Pardew said.
“Unfortunately for Daniel, to pull a hamstring is a serious injury and you can’t accelerate that process.
“You’ve got to understand that one of the strikers we were very interested in, which was a buy [Slimani], hasn’t played either.
“I have to say that Daniel has been committed to the club, with the work he’s done and everything else. I hope we see him on the pitch because he’s one of the few players in this group who can get a goal from nothing. He’s been a serious loss to the team.”
Albion paid a £2million loan fee for Sturridge and are also meeting the full amount of his £120,000-aweek wages until the end of the season. But the signing is under the microscope after chief executive Mark Jenkins admitted this week he was “shocked” at the state of the club’s finances after returning to the Hawthorns in February. Albion appear doomed to relegation and are bottom of the league, 10 points adrift of safety.
Pardew said: “We’ve only won three times this season so it suggests it’s going to be very difficult to stay up, if not impossible.
“We’ve just to take one game at a time and let’s just see if we can get a victory and build on it. The dressing room at Bournemouth in the last game was devastated, it’s as hurt as I’ve been as a manager.”