I'm not so sure Brian. As was widely commented at the time, very few teams are in a position to fork out over £20m in one go and will almost always look to pay in installments. In our case, I believe we were eventually offering (half an hour before the window closed, a favourite strategy of Levy that has yielded one success story in the past 15 years

) close to £25m in installments of 5-6m per annum over 4-5 years. That is a completely normal approach to a transfer. Even Real Madrid, propped up by the Spanish banks, had to pay Modric's fee over a similar period of time; and I doubt they coughed up Bale's fee in one go. No doubt they somehow wangled an agreement whereby they would indemnify us for Bale with shares in Spanish National Rail. I was always of the opinion that Peace's unpeaceful stance was to turn Berahino into Willian mrk II. He was simply using us as bait in the hope that one of the big fish would bite with a bigger bid. The fact that the player is now being linked with Chelsea seems to confirm that. Not that they'll necessarily sign him, but Peace certainly hopes that they will.