Leeds Look To Spend- But Who On? TimPM July 31, 2012 Leeds United, Transfer News 60 Comments The one up-side to losing our captain, who scored 13 goals and assisted 15 more in a side the wheels fell off by December, is the £3m promised to the club, with £1.5m reported to be burning a hole in the manager’s pocket. As hard as it is to see Snodgrass leave, especially for the happy-go-amazingly-lucky budgies of East Anglia, £3m is a lot of money to have to spend for Leeds. Neil Warnock, speaking in Cornwall, said: We don’t know what’s going to happen with Ross [McCormack] and I want to strengthen that area by getting lads who we know will score goals in the Championship. It’ll be a relief when we sign someone of the calibre I’m looking for. Rumours have since surfaced that Leeds are interested in Jay Bothroyd, Jermaine Beckford, Craig Mackail-Smith, and Nicky Maynard. Warnock downplayed a potential move for West Ham’s Maynard, saying the link probably came about as his team enquired about the availability of a number of players in that position, and probably alerted the agent. It would seem that Warnock is definitely searching for a new striker. LUFC White Knights started a new feature on their site called the “Round Table” where RITGK and TSB avoided committing on any one striker, and I decided to throw the ultimate curveball by comparing a free-signing of Emile Heskey to Reading’s inspired signing of similar striker Jason Roberts last January. Other fans, thinking slightly less outside the box, have inevitably latched onto the return of Jermaine Beckford, with not much else filling the #LUFC tag over the past few days. Beckford is rumoured to be on anywhere up to £40,000 a week at Leicester, with 3 years left to run, equating to about a £6m bill for Leicester. It seems an impossible task for Leeds to stump up that much even if Beckford has fallen out with manager Nigel Pearson, but if Beckford agreed to a pay cut, and Leicester waved the transfer fee, the deal could work – and Leicester’s books would look much more healthy. A move could well be on the cards, with more strikers arriving this summer and and expensive Beckford unlikely to be happily left in the reserves. Meanwhile, although Warnock insisted he very much wants to keep Ross McCormack, reading between the lines he is far from confident of convincing the striker to stay. Speaking to the official site, he said: It’s good to see him enjoying himself and that’s what we wanted him to do A couple of clubs have asked about taking him, but I don’t want to let him go unless there is a player exchange. I’d rather keep him and Ross knows that. I think we have to play it by ear. If he starts enjoying himself which he seems to be, we’ll have to see how it goes. His mention of a player exchange ties in with the rumours of a potential player exchange with Brighton, with McCormack moving one way and Craig Mackail-Smith moving the other. Mackail-Smith is highly rated, but didn’t perform in the Championship last season as he would have liked. The powerful striker could manage only 5 goals and 9 assists last season. But other rumours link Leeds to a direct replacement of Robert Snodgrass. Eddie Gray, writing in the YEP yesterday, downplayed that Warnock would look for a striker, saying he thought it was likely Warnock would look to replace Snodgrass with a midfielder. Snoddy was moved into “the hole” last season, and links to Peterborough’s George Boyd aren’t a bad shout. Boyd bagged 7 goals and 11 assists last season for a free-scoring but leaky Peterborough, playing at the tip of a diamond midfield. Some Posh fans feel Boyd hasn’t played as well since Mackail-Smith left Peterborough for Brighton last summer, though. As the two worked well together, Boyd is in the last year of his contract, and Mackail-Smith’s debut season for Brighton stalled, it might not be a bad idea to link the two up at Leeds and hope for their performances to blossom once they play alongside each other again? The Lee Peltier move, that we first made noises about in May, is still on apparently. £800,000 seems to be the full-back’s price, compared to £300,000 a couple of months ago. Peltier should be a good addition, and the cash potentially paid for him might help with negotiations for Beckford? Meanwhile, Sky Sports asked Leeds Twitterers if they would welcome Harry Kewell back to the club. Amazingly there were one or two positive responses, but the response was summarized by Sky Sports as “overwhelmingly negative”, For another illustration of how much more money there is in football today, Hary Kewell went to Liverpool for only £5m in 2003, only £3m of that went to the club due to Harry Kewell’s agent being given a ridiculous £2m, so Robert Snodgrass today – plying his trade for the first time in the Premier League, is worth the same as Kewell was then.