To be fair on the 9th of January James Pearce (the Liverpool fc correspondent for the echo) said that we were negotiating with Basel but were unwilling to match their £13m asking price. He said if the price didn't come down then the deal wouldn't happen. That was 2 weeks ago.
I know you should always drive a hard bargain but these days in footballing terms £13m isn't a huge figure especially for a highly rated 21 year old player with his whole career ahead of him. I reckon if we would have put the money on the table 2 weeks ago he'd be a Liverpool player now.
We recently spent £25m on virtual unknowns in Aspas Alberto and Ilorri who never get near the first team but by the same token we are unwilling to spend half that on a highly rated rising talent?
If you drag out transfer negotiations then this is what happens, sooner or later teams with more money are bound to come along, you'd think we'd have learned our lesson after the mkhitaryan and willian debacles last summer, obviously not.
Wether we needed another forward is another question altogether but once we were in for him to lose out to Chelsea for the sake of 3 or 4 million quid is frustrating.