Steve Parish has revealed that it was ‘difficult’ for Crystal Palace to sell Marc Guehi to Newcastle United in the final days of the window after defender Chadi Riad was injured.
Despite looking at alternatives, Newcastle remained hopeful of signing their top target from Crystal Palace late last month, even after the Eagles sold centre-back Joachim Andersen to Fulham. However, Chadi Riad had a knee injury just a few days before the window closed, scuppering any minuscule prospect of an agreement after the Black and Whites tabled a £65 million request plus £5 million in add-ons.
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Parish, acknowledging that Crystal Palace is not yet a destination club, stated in his own words that he “wants to be selling to clubs like Newcastle who have great aspirations and have recently been in the Champions League.” However, Parish stressed that players had ‘had to know that the club comes first’, referring to Crystal Palace’s lack of depth at the back and why the Londoners couldn’t bear letting Guehi leave late in the window.
“I don’t think the window worked out in exactly the same format that we thought it would,” the Crystal Palace chairman told Sky Sports. “Perhaps we assumed at first that Marc would leave and Joa would stay with us.
“We got the bid that we got for Joa and we felt that we needed to do something rather than not in that area because there are other things that we needed to do and we accepted that bid. I actually said in the interview before we did it that it would be really difficult to sell both of our starting centre-backs in one window.
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