Fans giddy as Paul Joyce confirms £100,000-a-week transfer

Liverpool fans are giddy as Dejan Lovren is off.

Respected journalist Paul Joyce, who works for The Times, has confirmed that Russian side Zenit St. Petersberg want to sign the Croatian.

Dejan Lovren, who earns around £100,000-a-week, has been at Liverpool for six years but will be given a mixed farewell reception.

Sporting director Michael Edwards has negotiated a £10.9 million exit for the 31-year-old, said the report, who departs after winning the Champions League and Premier League in the last two seasons.

Lovren hasn’t been a first team regular over the past couple of years and will want to play as many minutes as possible for his new club.

This exit will bring some questions, however. Who will step up and play the role as a fourth choice central defender? Sepp van den Berg and Ki-Jana Hoever are the next youngsters in line, but they’re probably not Premier League ready.

Liverpool may need to turn to the transfer market in order to bring in someone who is experienced and ready to step up to the top flight when called upon.

That’s going to be tricky and we may need to see someone like Ragnar Klavan come in on a short-term, fairly cheap deal to bridge the gap between van den Berg and Hoever.

Some fans are giddy with this news. Lovren is a man who divides opinion as he goes between spectacularly bad and pretty good. For a while he was even keeping Joe Gomez out of the first team, which indicates the ability the Croatian World Cup finalist does have.

But when he was bad, he was bad. The last time we saw Degsy live was his disastrous cameo against Everton, which seemed to be the beginning of the end for the man.

Will he now get one final run against Newcastle? If the treatment of Adam Lallana is anything to go by, he’ll have to watch from the sidelines.