Addicks turn to Green

With 5 days to go until it all kicks off again, Norwich City chief executive Neil Doncaster has revealed that Charlton have had an offer accepted for goalkeeper Robert Green.

26-year-old Green was signed as an apprentice by Norwich when he was 16, and has made 241 appearances during his 10-year stay at Carrow Road. His contract with the canaries expires next summer, and he has been linked with both Pompey and Fulham over the last 2 months.

Whenever its officially announced that we are in talks with a particular player the first thing I do is to scour the Internet for message boards and blogs relating to the players current team in order to gauge the opinion of their fans. In this case it appears that most of the Norwich supporters are already resigned to losing Green, and how they feel about the transfer depends upon how much money they get for him.

There are a couple of threads here which claim that the fee is likely to be £6 million (mostly due to this story in the Kent Messenger) but that is surely just wishful thinking. I can’t see Charlton paying that amount of money for a player who only has 1 years worth of Premiership experience, and is still yet to play after the cruciate ligament injury he suffered in the run up to the World Cup. The general consensus among the fans appears to be that Green is slightly overrated by all outside of Norwich, but has been a good servant to the club and they wish him all the best if he goes.

If the deal goes through I would expect the final fee to be between £2.2M and £2.5M, which by my reckoning would make Green the most expensive keeper we have ever signed.