It was rumoured after the farce that was the summer window that the manager was not happy and wanted to leave but that quickly died down and not sure it really had any substance to it. This time around though it does seem more natural to think it could be true.
Potter could easily have been faced yesterday with a situation where five members of his first team squad were moved on with no sign of replacements for him to work with. Carrol, Montero and Bony were all criticised this season and not first team regulars but even with those three out you would have hoped that somewhere we could have seen a replacement arrive just to show some willing.
Many rumours are built on the back of a convenient story but we should remember here that both Leroy Fer and Dan James were at other clubs when the window was closing and definitely the plan from the club was to allow both to leave. To see both dramatically u-turn in the way that they did suggests that something happened behind the scenes at Swansea and more than the reported change in fee structure from Leeds.
So there is a definite logic in possibly believing that the manager threatened to walk if both were allowed to go and if you thought playing departures would have been damaging to the club allowing a manager to leave because of it would have been football suicide for beginners.
It would have left us in a position where nobody with any reputation to protect would have wanted to come here and certainly would have killed off any hope we do have of reaching the play offs and progressing in what starts to look like a very open FA Cup competition.
I have no idea whether Potter threatened to walk or not and I don’t suspect it will actually ever be publicly known if he did (well, not until maybe he publishes his memoirs in years to come) but what I do know is that something happened behind the scenes yesterday evening that stopped two seemingly done deals in their tracks. And that in itself makes this particular rumour make sense.
<#lufc>