Bolton chairman Phil Gartside has told the Manchester Evening News that he hopes to sign Liverpool striker El-Hadji Diouf on a permanent basis in the summer.
Senegal international Diouf is currently in fine form for the Trotters having netted four Premiership goals since the turn of the year and Gartside says he is hopeful of haggling an acceptable deal with Liverpool to bring the once £10 million forward to the Reebok Stadium for keeps.
"We are certainly going to try to keep him here next season. I think he wants to stay and we want him. It's a question of trying to get the right financial deal with Liverpool."
"It's not so much a matter of reaching agreement with Diouf as Liverpool. We know what his aspirations are. He might not get exactly what he wants but we know where we are going.
"But we need to do a deal which will suit both clubs and we will try to do that this summer. When we took him on loan we talked about the possibility of keeping him."
Gartside fears that Diouf's recent success on the field may alert other clubs to his availability but he is hopeful that the African will choose to stay loyal to Bolton.
"There's always a danger of someone else coming in. He hadn't been very successful in English football but we have tried to revive his career. Hopefully, we will benefit from the situation where he improves with us. If he hadn't been successful with us, we wouldn't be wanting to buy him. "
The Trotters supremo knows that signing the 2002 World Cup star will not come cheap and has referred to a similar situation 12 years ago when the club signed David Lee from Southampton following a successful spell on loan.
"I remember when we signed David Lee from Southampton. We couldn't afford £100,000 but we had to because he was so successful and Diouf is almost giving us that sort of problem.
Gartside is confident that the 23-year old can put all recent bad publicity behind him and says that Bolton is the only place for him to resurrect his promising career.
"He's not the easiest of players to understand and manage. People are not only going to look at his success with us but at the lad himself and see that he attracts the wrong kind of publicity. There's no way anyone is going to pay £10m.
"But we have seen him week in, week out and he's a tremendous player. He gets frustrated, he gets hammered and referees don't protect him and players give him a lot of stick.
"He reacts with frustration. He's not malicious and we've got to hope that as a 23-year-old he grows out of it."
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Let's just hope we can get a good deal out of this although it looks like we are going to make a substantial loss on him whatever. If we can even get half of what we paid for him we have done extremely well.
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