Geoff Butler has failed in his bid to tempt highly-rated Forest Green Rovers striker, Carl Heggs, to the Wessex Stadium.
The Terras boss revealed that he held transfer talks with the former West Bromwich Albion goal ace, last week. But despite being impressed by Butler’s sales patter, the 31-year-old Leicester-based player has decided to remain at The Lawn.
Butler explained: “I spoke to Forest Green’s new manager Colin Addison and just made a tentative enquiry about Carl. He’s a quality player who I have admired for a while and I was just interested to see if he figured in Collin’s plans. To my surprise, Colin said I was welcome to talk to Carl and so that’s what I did. What with their being a new manager at the club and him having had a bad shoulder injury recently, I think he was just weighing up options. We had a interesting chat and he was certainly tempted, but in the end he decided that he’d be better off trying to find a club in the Midlands such as Tamworth or someone like that.”
He added: “As it is, Carl’s now back in the team at Forest Green and so it looks like he won’t be going anywhere for a while although I’ll certainly be keeping my eye on the situation.”
Butler said that Heggs, who has had spells at Carlisle, Rushden, Swansea, Bristol Rovers and Northampton, is the sort of player he would like to bring to the south coast.
“We desperately need a forward to replace David Laws,” he admitted, “and a quality striker like Carl fits the bill. Generally they are few and far between, but I’ll keep searching and talking to players until we get the man we want.”
