Early on this season, Reading signed Jamie Cureton for £250,000 just after we learnt that Nicky Forster was seriously injured and potentially out for the season. Now every Reading fan must have been pleased by this news - it showed that we as a club were serious about wanting to go up this season, we'd all seen Cureton score a lot of goals, and we recognised that he was a good player. And on top of all that, he was surprisingly cheap.
At first I had understood that his contract at Bristol Rovers was up at the end of this season, so it seemed that they were just cashing in on an asset, particularly as Cureton had made it fairly clear he intended to leave to further his career. However, that was wrong - his contract with Rovers ran until 30th June, 2003.
We also knew that Bristol Rovers had turned down an offer from Hibernian during the close season, which was supposedly £300,000. This made the transfer fee Reading paid seem even more strange. But perhaps it wasn't Bristol Rovers that turned down the Hibs deal? After all, you don't further your career by stepping down into a fifth-rate league, not even when you were previously at Bristol Rovers. There were also stories that Hibs had come back and offered £400,000 but I'm not sure how believable they were.
And in any event, what did it matter? Every other club in the division, plus the media, were talking about Reading getting the steal of the season, and that is such a nice change from what has happened in the more recent past. I could even overlook the history of players that we had bought for £250,000 - that was the price for Steve Moran, Craig Maskell, Michael Meaker and Keith Scott (allegedly). And none of that lot had even come close to justifying the fee, even in the days when it was considered a huge sum.
And then after Cureton had joined Reading the rumours started, and I'll go into those in a bit more detail below. At first, my reaction was that this was something you could expect from a city like Bristol with two underachieving clubs. Their fans sit around in pubs at night and make up stories about each other. My best guess was that rumours slandering Cureton came from disgruntled City fans, and had started before he left Rovers.
Also, Bristol Rovers fans were going on about how we would regret the deal because Cureton was a lazy git who cared only for himself and nothing for the team. They also said he was a disruptive influence in the dressing-room. Well, to some extent that was OK - if it was true, Pardew and Allen would have no trouble sorting out those sort of problems. In fact, with the announcement on Thursday, 9th November that Cureton is not as fit as Alan Pardew would like, it seems that there may well be some truth about the "lazy" part. In any event, a player that can score 53 goals in two seasons whilst being lazy is not a problem as far as I'm concerned! All it means is that he is not performing to his potential. And if he did pull his finger out, he would be moving up the divisions even quicker than Reading are going to.
But in any event I didn't really believe the stories about being a disruptive influence. Those comments are exactly the sort you would expect to hear from the fans of a club who have just lost one of their star players, and think that they have been hard done by. Ian Holloway, the Bristol Rovers manager, didn't really help matters (and after all, why should he) by banning the media from asking him about the level of Cureton's transfer fee. When Cureton himself was asked, he would normally say something about Bristol Rovers being keen to let him go, and add that they'd just received a hefty fee for Jason Roberts. This didn't help much either!
Three other possibilites about the level of the fee have surfaced - one is that Bristol Rovers will get a hefty percentage of any sell-on fee, and that part of the price for that percentage was a lower initial fee. Well, that sounds possible at first, although you would still expect the initial fee to be more than we actually paid. After all, Rovers have no guarantee that we will actually sell him at any point for a fee. If we go up to Division 1, that might be Cureton's level. Or he might leave on a Bosman once his contract's up.
This leads on to a second possibility - there has to be a chance that there will be no transfer fees at all in the future, or at least only for the very youngest players, and some people have suggested that Bristol Rovers were merely taking an opportunity to get some money for their player before the EU declared that such deals were illegal. This sounds vaguely plausible but does not fit well with the news of the potential Hibs deal over the summer, or with the fact that everyone knows the wheels of the EU take a long time to turn. However, of all the things I have heard about the Cureton transfer deal, this one sounds to me like it has the greatest ring of truth.
The third possibility, and again this is down to rumour, was that we had only agreed with Bristol Rovers to take Cureton off them for a temporary period, and that the fee we paid was therefore only for a loan of the player. One argument behind this story would be the fact that the contract he signed with Reading goes up to the same date as his old deal with Rovers. Another point is that Nicky Forster will be back at some stage, meaning that Cureton might be surplus to requirements. The story for this particular rumour goes that Cureton wanted to get out of Bristol for nine months, signed for Reading, and that we would sell him back to Rovers just before the transfer deadline this season for a fee based on his performances for us. The fact that, at the time of this rumour, Cureton still lived in Bristol showed that it was wrong.
But let's be honest, if you've read this article this far you're waiting to hear about sex. And the third other possibility mentioned above hints at that with the suggestion that Cureton wanted to "get out of Bristol for nine months". On this website, we have up to this point studiously avoided any mention of these scurrilous rumours for two reasons:
(a) We didn't believe them, and
(b) They didn't help Reading at all.
It is a shame that other websites did not take the same view, as this might have allowed some of the allegations that Cureton has had to face to die out. Today (Thursday, 9th November) he has stated in the Evening Post that the rumours of an intimate nature have affected him and his family to the extent that he needs to move home, and anything of this nature must surely affect his game as well. Now that the allegations and denials are firmly in the open, I can try to debunk this scandalous rumour, or set of rumours.
The story initially went that Cureton had got a 16-year-old girl pregnant, and that her family were Bristol City fans. The family were unhappy (particularly because he was a Rovers player) and had threatened him, so that he had to leave Bristol. Subsequently this story has taken on a life of its own - people have been quite happy to write that the girl in question was the niece of the Bristol City chairman, then she was the niece of the Bristol Rovers chairman, then people published her name (with the same surname as the Rovers chairman), then people stated that she was 15 and the police were involved. One story stated that Cureton was already paying child maintenance payments for three children, just to try to add some more smoke.
We have heard stories about how the dirt would be in the News of the World (that was a month ago, and they've still printed nothing). We have heard about how the police were taking an interest (which of course was only added to the rumour once the girl's age became 15 rather than 16). We have heard that Cureton would be arrested in the week beginning 6th November (oh yes, like the police would really announce something like that in advance!). As mentioned above, we have heard that Cureton wanted to get out of Bristol for nine months until the transfer deadline (ignoring the fact that the transfer deadline was only 7 months away!!!!).
And yet all of these rumours were obviously wrong for one simple reason - at the time of writing, Jamie Cureton still lives in Bristol!
Immediately the whole house of cards comes crashing down - if he had transgressed in the way quoted and was under threat from relatives, he surely had to move house as well. In any event, moving to Reading wouldn't really have helped, and again you have to say that surely that move to Edinburgh looked more promising. My view on all this is very clear - the stories were totally made up, in Bristol, probably by City fans before he left, or possibly by Rovers fans afterward.
And let's not think that Reading fans can sleep with an easy conscience over this matter. From the websites to the fanzine to the fans talking on the terraces, we have been just as guilty of spreading stories about one of our top players. We need to take a long hard look at our own part in this and see what we can do to stop it happening again.
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