Evans set for new £5m deal
RIYAD MAHREZ picked up the nickname ‘Tom Hanks’ after his shenanigans on deadline day last summer left him stuck somewhere he did not want to be.
Leicester’s maverick star is now in danger of being dubbed ‘Forrest Gump’ after his latest transfer window strop.
Mahrez has got a big job on his hands if he wants to get his fed-up team-mates back onside after seeing his dream move to Manchester City blow up in his face this week.
He has managed to anger just about everyone at the club, from the paying fans to the club’s Thai owners, with a second transfer request.
The 26-year-old Algeria forward had to eat a big wedge of humble pie last time around when he found himself cooped up in Paris waiting for the phone to ring to tell him who he was joining. It never did.
When he got back to Leicester he found himself teasingly referred to as Hanks, whose character in the film The Terminal, becomes stuck at New York’s JFK Airport and makes it his home.
That gentle dressing-room banter reflects the lighthearted treatment given to Mahrez’s bizarre game of international hide and seek.
But this time around it might just be a shade more frosty after Mahrez did another disappearing act 24 hours before deadline day – on the eve of a key fixture at Everton. While the players were put through WEST BROM are ready to offer Jonny Evans a bumper new £100,000-a-week deal.
Baggies manager Alan Pardew has told Arsenal they were warned about any late offers after the club rejected their deadline day bid for the defender.
Evans, 30, has 18 months of his contract left and Pardew feels everyone would benefit if he was rewarded with a lucrative new deal which would be in the region of £5million a year.
“I told him what happened on Wednesday,” said Pardew. “He understood that and now, in my view, we need to sit Jonny down and see if we can get a contract that works for him going forward.”
Pardew believes Arsenal only have themselves to blame that their cheeky deadline day bid of less than £10m failed.
He said: “It needed to be a bid that was going to knock us off our chair and it was nowhere near that. So they probably got the response they were expecting with that bid.”
West Brom, meanwhile, will honour Cyrille Regis by wearing special shirts against Southampton tomorrow.