Record fee of #17.7m gets Duff moving

Soccer: The saga of Damien Duff's transfer to Chelsea was finally resolved last night when the 24-year-old Irishman became the fourth player to join the Stamford Bridge club since Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich carted his hefty chequebook into London at the start of the month.

Ten days after it was initially confirmed that Chelsea had been in contact with Blackburn Rovers with a view to buying him, and five days after the club started negotiations over personal terms after having their offer accepted, a deal was agreed in the late afternoon yesterday.

Duff will now make a swift visit to Malaysia to join Claudio Ranieri's squad for a pre-season tournament before being officially unveiled at a press conference next Monday in London.

Duff is comfortably the most expensive of the new arrivals to date with Chelsea paying Blackburn Rovers an estimated fee of £17.7 million (€25 million) as well as a package to the Irishman that will bring the total cost of having him around the place for the five years of his contract to almost exactly twice that amount.

The fee beats both Chelsea's previous record - the £15 million paid to Athletico Madrid for Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink three years ago - and the highest fee previously handed over for an Irishman - the £13 million paid by Inter Milan to Coventry City for Robbie Keane, also in 2000.

And the scale of the payment seems certain to ensure that Duff will be regarded as a key figure in a team that Abramovich clearly intends will be capable of mounting a serious challenge for the Premiership title this season and even, if the spending continues at the present rate, the Champions League.

Typically, Duff seemed rather underwhelmed by it all last night as he made a brief appearance on Chelsea's television channel before joining his adviser Pat Devlin and members of his family for dinner.

"It's been a tough weekend and a long one," he said in the television interview after the deal had been concluded. "And it was a tough decision because I didn't really want to leave Blackburn.

"I just want to get playing football now," he added. "I'm not interested in all this hullabaloo and just want to get playing football again."

The Dubliner, like Devlin, played down the question of whether he had continued to hope over the weekend that Manchester United might come in at the 11th hour with a counter-offer that would enable him to play for the club he has always supported while remaining in his current home in the Ribble Valley.

"The Man United stuff was speculation and it just came down to whether I wanted to stay at Blackburn or move to Chelsea," he claimed.

Despite the huge money on the table, the decision appears to have remained an agonising one for the Ireland international even after United chairman Peter Kenyon had made it clear on Sunday evening that Ronaldinho's move to Barcelona would not prompt a late change in attitude at Old Trafford towards Duff.

As late as yesterday morning there were reports that the winger was reluctant to sign, although Devlin insisted things were always moving in the right direction and he had never seriously doubted the deal would be concluded.

"It was always a point that was going to be reached," said Devlin last night. "It was just a question of how we got there. What was very important was that at every stage of this process Chelsea made it very clear how much they wanted Damien to join the club. He's been very impressed by everything here, but that mattered a lot to him.

"Obviously it's a very exciting time for Chelsea, the club really looks to be going places so it would have been a very hard move to turn down," he said before adding, in relation to Duff's reported reluctance to move south, "Look, Blackburn was fantastic but with the greatest of respect it's like a lad serving his time. You move on, and he has done that - with Chelsea he's going to be centre stage."

On his flight to Malaysia this morning Duff is likely to have Chelsea's other big signing for the day, Wayne Bridge, for company after the England full back completed his own £7 million move from Southampton in the morning.

Though the total expenditure on the 22-year-old is considerably short of the Duff figure other aspects of the Bridge deal seem to illustrate just as clearly the scale of Abramovich's determination to reshape the Chelsea squad ahead of the Champions League recruitment deadline.

As part of the agreement Graeme Le Saux moves to Southampton, though in order to allow Gordon Strachan to preserve the wage structure at the St Mary's stadium the Londoners will continue to pay two-thirds of the veteran left back's £30,000-a-week salary for the two-year duration of the contract he has signed with his new club.