PORT VALE V Cheltenham Town / The Completely-suzuki Stadium / Today, 3pm
DAVID Flitcroft has revealed just how in-depth Port Vale went in their bid to sign a striker in the January transfer window. The Valiants director of football also spoke of the “hurt” he felt at what he described as the “hatred in the stadium” at Fleetwood and then in the home game against Leyton Orient, where fans chanted for him to leave the club.
On the striker issue, Flitcroft, speaking on the club’s podcast, said: “When you look at the market for recognised strikers with experience, our main target fell early.
“We presented to him and the Premier League club. He had scored a lot of League Two goals, he had the aggression and the desire to get into the box and hurt people, which if I am a Port Vale fan that’s what I want to see.
“There was a frustration around that one because we felt we presented to him well, and his representatives well, but the club he went to was only 45 minutes for him, so geographically, we lost out.
“There was another player we went for, we thought we’d got him. We’d done the wages, and were really strong on the wages, then we got asked at the last hour for an astronomical loan fee. We looked at that and it wasn’t something we wanted to do.
“So we re-set and put two bids in for two players we felt were worth the club investing in. A Premier League player where we had a bid accepted and he was locked into his loan club. The loan club had a clause in there that he was locked in, so again, we couldn’t get him.
“There was another loan player who was up in Scotland, an outstanding player that we’d tracked for about six months.
“We have a great relationship with Arsenal and we thought we’d got him. A foreign club came in for him where the deal was too good to be true. And a better level than League One.
“So Arsenal had that choice on that one.”
He added: “We got completely outbid on another with one of the top hitters in League Two. Another striker we felt would get us the