Thought this Bascombe post is spot on, esoecially the lack of public board support for Martinez until yesterday.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/fo...-is-not-for-sale-they-can-really-mean-it.html
Chelsea did not help him or themselves with the timing of their offers. Universally praised for moving swiftly when they bought Cesc Fabregas and Diego Costa in 2014, bidding for Stones three weeks before the start of the season was always going to rile Martinez who is a far more belligerent than his affable exterior suggests. When Martinez said Stones would not be leaving in this window, he did not do so in the hope Jose Mourinho would return with a £40 million cheque.
Martinez’s response after Everton’s League Cup win over Barnsley was his most forceful to date. To be fair to the Spanish coach, until then he was a one-man media response unit over the whole saga, which might explain why Chelsea seemed unwilling to or incapable of taking what was said at face value. Encouraging Stones to hand in a transfer request when you have no idea if a deal will ever be struck bordered on the obscene (we must presume Chelsea had a role in that since they appeared to know it was on its way a week before Stones wrote it).
If you want cynicism, there appears to be a trend to encourage a 'hate mob' to mobilise and turn on a player so the cameras can focus on abusers or shirt burners, thus making a position untenable. Do not mistake a few publicity grabbers for the Everton fanbase, the overwhelming majority recognising Stones as an ambitious player understandably tempted by the move. Stones was put in an invidious position by the trail of events. Martinez had warned it would change nothing – once more, that matter of a long contract limiting the power of the player.
Chairman Bill Kenwright’s public statement on Thursday evening was a welcome intervention and seems to have made the London club back off.
That could have come sooner. The initial lack of a public response to Stones’s formal letter was baffling and may even have contributed to many (wrongly) concluding the sands had shifted. Martinez took the opportunity with his impressive and reassuring performance at Oakwell to correct that error and clarify that was not the case, but it was a mood shifter when Kenwright confirmed it. It should not always be left to a manager facing the microphones to reaffirm a club’s stance. The manager, after all, is an employee who is a hostage to fortune.
We now – finally – have the assurance Martinez was speaking entirely for his board. A fanbase increasingly wary of their club's history of selling high on the last day of the transfer window must be confident there will be no compromise this time. By Thursday evening we reached the point where Everton can not let Stones go. They left themselves no wriggle room. No Chelsea bid can be deemed acceptable before September 1, regardless of how high Mourinho is prepared to go or how many transfer records threatened.
By resisting, Martinez will offer a timely reminder to all clubs with players on long contracts that when they insist an asset is not for sale, it is possible to really mean it.
