The Continuing Story Of Bareth Garry (Part 3 – It finally gets interesting!)

By: Martini Extra Dry | July 13th, 2008

The only story that’s keeping the tabloid papers busy this summer, other than that poor old ’slave’ Ronaldo, is Gareth Barry’s imminent departure to Liverpool. It began before the season ended, with Benitez and O’Neill spitting their dummies out over each other’s handling of the transfer.

But as the weeks and months have dragged on it has become pretty boring; Liverpool bid, Villa reject, O’Neill speaks out in the Birmingham Post, Rafa replies in the Scouser Times, Lierpool bid, Villa reject… and repeat to fade. At first everyone was excited, now everyone is bored.

Enter Arsene Wenger…

This weekend has seen a new twist in the tale, with Arsenal now apparently ready to launch a hijack bid, taking Barry right from under Liverpool’s nose.

Sneaky? No, I don’t think so. In my opinion, Rafa Benitez has been a bit of a dillweed over the whole thing. I’m not sure if he’s more accustomed to doing his shopping at the Rag Market or what, but it makes sense to me that if Villa have said ‘Barry can leave for £18 million’ and you make about 4 bids that are all consistently lower than this valuation, then you won’t get your man.

Last year Villa had Scott Carson on loan from Liverpool and after a season between our sticks, MON was happy enough with his performances to want him to move permanently to Villa Park. But… Liverpool slapped a £10 million price tag on his head. To which, Villa said ‘We don’t feel he’s worth that much money’ and politely declined. We didn’t send 4 transfer offers of lower amounts, we just accepted that his price was £10 million and made a decision of whether he was worth that much. We chose that he wasn’t.

End of story. No big fuss, no tears, no dummies thrown out of prams. Liverpool, however, haven’t seemed to take the same attitude to buying our players.

And now it looks possible that Arsenal could swoop in at the eleventh hour and steal their target away from them. Serves them right, I think.

I didn’t (and still don’t) want Barry to leave Villa, but as it has become so apparent that he’s going to, I’d now like to see him go to anyone but Liverpool. Not because I have some hatred for Liverpool (I don’t) but just because I think they’ve been totally moronic in their pursuit of him.

A transfer couldn’t have been more straight forward; Barry wanted to go to Liverpool, Liverpool wanted Barry to go to Liverpool, Villa agreed to let him go and stated the price. It should’ve all been wrapped up a long, long time ago.

So, where would Villa fans like to see him go?

Keep checking here for updates.