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Crystal Palace: Cook reflects on Andersen signing

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Image for Crystal Palace: Cook reflects on Andersen signing

Dan Cook has been speaking about how Crystal Palace managed to sign Joachim Andersen on the HLTCO podcast.

Patrick Vieira sealed the fourth new signing of the summer since his arrival when Andersen was announced on Wednesday as a Crystal Palace player, with the defender signing a five-year contract at Selhurst Park.

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Andersen spent last season on loan at Fulham from Olympique Lyonnais, however, he was unable to keep them in the Premier League. He still saw his name linked with big clubs such as Tottenham Hotspur, though it’s the Eagles who have managed to land the Denmark international.

With Andersen now a Palace player, Cook analysed how the club pulled it off, praising the negotiating techniques of Dougie Freedman.

“According to Alan Nixon, the relatively well-connected journalist – who I’m led to believe, has a direct link to someone with a Scottish accent inside the football club; I won’t name names, but I’m sure you can make your own conclusions there – we eventually managed to secure a deal with Lyon for Joachim Andersen, it was some £10 million less than we were first quoted.

“So it speaks to the negotiation skills of the football club, and it’s something that we saw throughout the When Eagles Dare documentary, was that when Dougie Freedman is given the opportunity to work in the transfer market with a relative degree of freedom, he can get bargains in.”

TIF Thoughts on Palace signing Andersen…

Andersen is Vieira’s second new centre-back to arrive at the club this summer, following the previous arrival of Marc Guehi, so it appears that the new manager wants to establish a new centre-back pairing for the upcoming season.

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With the Eagles seeing 11 players leave the club this summer following the expiration of their contracts, it appeared to be a huge rebuild on Vieira’s hands, but it appears the Frenchman has a clear plan of bringing in younger players to ensure squad depth and energy.

Last season, Palace’s squad had the highest average age in the whole Premier League (28.8), so replacing players such as Gary Cahill and Scott Dann, 35 and 34 years old respectively, with Andersen and Guehi at 21 and 25, is a huge step forward to freshening the squad up for this season and years to come.

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