Morientes Move Rests on New Coach

Liverpool are to increase their bid for Fernando Morientes to £5m, though the striker will seek a private meeting with the newly appointed Real Madrid coach Wanderley Luxemburgo before committing himself to leaving the Bernabéu.

Morientes has been reduced to a bit-part role at Madrid this season, falling behind Ronaldo, Raul and Michael Owen in the pecking order to the extent that he has yet to score a goal in the Spanish League. That had convinced him that his future lay on Merseyside.

Now his agent Gines Carvajal will seek clarification from Luxemburgo, appointed yesterday, over his client's position at Real, though Liverpool remain confident the player will still want to move. Luxemburgo is unlikely to offer Morientes the immediate guarantee of first-team football and may even try to bring the Santos forward Robinho to Spain, pushing Morientes further out of the picture.

Madrid's president Florentino Pérez had rejected an opening £3.5m bid and hoped to raise nearer £7m for Morientes; the alternative was to be granted first refusal on Steven Gerrard and a radically reduced fee for Morientes, which Liverpool have resisted.

Pérez is now likely to accept a £5m offer for a player who has publicly stated his desire to move to Merseyside and who has 18 months to run on his contract. Furthermore, Real are aware they will need to soften their stance to receive even that fee given that Liverpool have already threatened to turn elsewhere.

Newcastle, who had made contact with Real to check on Morientes' availability, have since dropped their interest.

Morientes is cup-tied in Europe and Rafael Benítez was intent on not paying over the odds for a player who can play only domestically for the rest of this season. If he moves over the next few days, the Spaniard would theoretically be available to make his debut in the FA Cup tie with Burnley at Turf Moor on January 8.

Luxemburgo becomes the third man in charge of Real this season, the 52-year-old signing a contract running until the end of next term. He follows Mariano García Remón, who was removed after only three months and who in turn succeeded José Antonio Camacho.

After a slump that has seen Real fall to fifth in the Spanish League, and question marks over the form of many of the galácticos, the board moved for the former Brazil coach.

Luxemburgo joins from Santos, where he has just clinched the Brazilian title for the fifth time in his career.

His swift appointment surprised the Spanish press, who had been touting Sven-Goran Eriksson and Internazionale's Roberto Mancini.

Meanwhile Spain's coach Luis Aragonés, came under fire again yesterday after he referred to Arsenal's José Antonio Reyes as a "gypsy" in an interview in a Spanish paper.

Aragonés already faces a disciplinary inquiry by the Spanish FA after infamously telling Reyes he was a better than "that black shit" Thierry Henry.

Yesterday he told El Mundo: "Reyes is ethnically a gypsy, I've got a lot of gypsy friends just as I have a lot of black friends. All I did was to motivate the gypsy by telling him he was better than the black."

An editorial in the same paper despaired of Aragonés: "He takes one foot out of his mouth only to put the other one in. He would do well to leave the whole subject alone."