West Ham United goalkeeper Adrian is being linked with Newcastle United.
West Ham United manager Slaven Bilic has told Football.London that he is confident goalkeeper Adrian will stay with the club amid interest from Newcastle United.
Adrian, 30, joined West Ham from Real Betis back in the summer of 2013, and the Spaniard has been a regular first-team player in his four years at the club.
With more than 100 appearances to his name, Adrian has largely been a solid goalkeeper for West Ham, though he did lose his place to Darren Randolph for a large chunk of last season.
The Spaniard has now seen Randolph leave the club for Middlesbrough, but the arrival of Joe Hart on loan from Manchester City means that Adrian is the clear second choice at the London Stadium.
With the Hammers ace still harbouring ambitions of being in the Spain squad of the World Cup in Russia next summer, he may have to leave the club before the end of the transfer window.
The strongest link right now is to Newcastle United, with the Daily Mail claiming that they could swap Karl Darlow for Adrian in a goalkeeper swap between the two Premier League rivals.
However, West Ham boss Slaven Bilic has told Football.London that he would love to keep Adrian, and didn’t even want to sell Randolph, but understands that no goalkeeper wants to be third choice.
Bilic added that he is confident Adrian will stay and possibly sign a new contract, but did acknowledge that he is ambitious and may want to play, in which case West Ham will ‘try to help him’.
“I spoke with Randolph and Adrian and we were more than happy with them,” said Bilic. “We wanted to keep one of them to have three keepers. It was not necessary to sell either of them. Nobody wants to be third choice, of course. Now that Randy went to Middlesbrough, it’s Joe and Adrian and the situation with Adrian is that we would love to keep him. We rate him, we like him, we would like to offer him a new contract and hopefully he is going to accept it and stay.”
“I am confident he will stay but on the other hand, Adrian is ambitious. He is very polite, a proper sportsman, a long time a West Ham and the club is very respectful towards him. We want to help him. It’s a challenge between him and Joe, hopefully he is going to stay. If he is desperate to be guaranteed to be number one we will try to help him. I told him, I would like to make everybody happy but number one goal is to care about the team and squad and that extends to him as well,” he added.
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