Doncaster Rovers chairman John Ryan says he expects Town owner and chairman Marcus Evans to return with new offers for striker Billy Sharp and midfielder James Coppinger. Yesterday, Ryan revealed that his club had rejected bids of £2.3 million for Sharp and £300,000 for Coppinger, the latter a figure he describes as “laughable”.
Ryan has told Town they will be wasting their time if they return with a new proposal: "They did say they would [come back with another offer] but I said to Marcus Evans not to bother. We’re trying to build a team for next season like he’s trying to build a team.
"We want it to be a powerful squad and I reckon Billy Sharp is good for 25 goals a season if he stays fit and James has had the best season of his career and is very optimistic that he can do even better. Even he can weigh in with 10 goals but mainly create the bullets for Billy to fire.”
The Rovers chief says the Blues are well short in their £300,000 valuation of Coppinger, who like Sharp has two years left on his contract: "It’s laughable, isn’t it? It was explained to me that he’s 30 and he’ll be worth nothing at the end of his contract, but that was an easy one to turn down. It wouldn’t have mattered if it was a million, we would still have turned it down.”
Ryan has spoken to both players and says they are in no hurry to move on: "The nice thing is that Billy indicated that he wasn’t really bothered about going and Copps is quite happy to stay as well, which is a big influence because if players want to go it’s very difficult to hang on to them.
"But the situation is that we’ve said there’s no way we would accept these offers and everyone agreed. We’ve told Ipswich that we don’t want to sell, we’re very pleased that you rate our players but as far as we’re concerned we don’t want to sell.
"[Manager] Sean O’Driscoll is trying to build a squad for next season to try and be at the upper end of the league and the last thing we want to do is lose players like Billy and Copps.”