West Bromwich Albion manager Alan Irvine has revealed that he did not watch record signing Brown Ideye live before the transfer was completed.
The Baggies are believed to have spent as much as £10m to bring the Nigerian forward to The Hawthorns from Dynamo Kyiv, but Irvine was forced to rely on video footage and reports from his scouts to make sure the deal was right for the club.
"I don't know much about Brown Ideye," the Baggies boss told reporters. "I've not seen him live, but people we trust have done.
"It's not necessarily something that is detrimental to me not to have seen him live, though ideally I would like to because that's how I like to do my work, but we've done our research on him and what we have done is found decent players in the past in this way."
Ideye scored 33 goals in 74 games during his time in Ukraine.
