Benjamin Brereton

[Sausage Roll]

Paul Taylor:

"They want to sign him.

And it feels as though that is increasingly a possibility.

But the way this whole thing has panned out has been a lesson in the art of the use of the media to get things moving...

Told that, when noises were being made about Blackburn having made bids of £5m and £6m over the past two or three weeks, Forest were a little bit baffled, because that hadn’t been the case.

What’s also interesting is that Forest are also understood to have turned down the advances of a Premier League club, in and around deadline day, who were willing to pay up to £10m for the player...

So £5m or £6m was never going to get the deal done...

But if Blackburn are willing to pay up to £14m for the player, that is the kind of figure that is going to get Forest thinking very seriously.

If they do put that kind of money on the table, it has to be something close to the right kind of price for him... particularly if there are some decent sell-ons involved. That will be the key to this deal, if it happens.

As Aitor Karanka has repeatedly said, if a club is willing to pay the right amount of money for Forest and the player himself wants to go, a deal always has the chance of happening.

£5m or £6m was never going to be enough... but if suggestions that Blackburn are ready to up the ante do indeed prove to be true, then it could change the dynamic considerably.

Karanka has been asked, more than once...

... if Forest would work to sign a replacement for Brereton, if he was to leave the club, either on loan or on loan with a view to a permanent move - and he said that they would.

So Forest are not going to let him leave and leave themselves short of attacking options in the process.