Quote Ferocious Aardvark="Ferocious Aardvark"But nobody would have any great issue at all for any signing bthat simply didn't work out - and while Iestyn never regained the dizzy heights of his younger days, he was an excellent player for us. But even if he hadn't have been, anyone should accept that any signing may or may not "work".
The sort of issues which ARE relevant to the present discussion are first, and most obviously, the farrago as to whether we were free to sign him in the first place, and second the alleged gross mismanagement of the signing situation which if what has been written is true, resulted in us losing Leon Pryce (who wanted the No. 6 slot for himself and understandably so), Jamie Peacock (who claims he'd been told the cupboard was bare and then we sign Harris) and those sort of ramifications.
Could we have signed Harris AND kept stars such as Pryce and Peacock happy? Well, presumably, there would have been a way. It's only basically man management, after all. Leaving the direct finances aside, I was devastated that we lost the services of Pryce and Peacock and firmly believe that it should have been avoided.'"
Agree fully with your assessment of Harris' playing record with us. He always played for the Bulls with commitment and no little skill, and to be blunt, his only drawback was that he just wasn't the Iestyn Harris of old, which meant the (reported) salary he was given was probably more than a little bit over the top.
I sort of agree about the man management too, to be fair, though it would have taken the wisdom of Soloman to square a circle in which Harris, Pryce and Peacock were all going to be happy. Though I guess the club fully realised that fitting in Iestyn would cause immense problems and, the powers that were, were prepared to let them depart. Not the best bit of business nor the most glorious bit of our history, it must be said.
To be honest we don't know the costs of the court case other than Leeds/Hetherington/Caddick were wanting a reported £3m. Since it was ultimately settled out of court we must assume it would have been much less, although, to be fair to the OP, when you add in the salary (reportedly, £1m over 4 years IIRC) to the amount of compo (maybe C £1m?) plus legal costs (both sides, presumably) then maybe £2.5m isn't all that far away from the mark for the cost of the whole "Harris affair", though obviously the salary was really part of the the overall 'running costs' and would have been there whether we'd signed him or not .
Whether he was free to sign was the big issue. Much opinion said the Leeds case was a restraint of trade, indeed Iestyn's own legal people said he was free to sign, so it clearly wasn't cut and dried and poor decision as it turned out to be, it wasn't just the club who got it wrong.
