Fulham have been rebuffed in their bid to sign the Sheffield Wednesday defender Tom Lees after the Owls rejected a bid of around £1.2m for their centre half, according to a report in this morning’s Daily Mail.
The 24 year-old has only been at Hillsborough for a single season having joined from Leeds last summer but firmly established himself as a key member of the miserly Wednesday defence, which matched the club’s record of seventeen clean sheets last term. Lees, who was capped at England under-21 level by Stuart Pearce in 2012, made 48 appearances for the Owls last season and has already been offered an extension to the three-year contract he signed on leaving Leeds – for whom he had played over a hundred games – last July.
Kit Symons is keen to reshape a porous defence that conceded 83 goals during a trying Championship campaign and has been linked with summer moves for the likes of Lewis Dunk and Richard Stearman. With Wednesday keen to hold onto one of their outstanding performers, Fulham will have to return with a significantly improved second offer and it remains to be seen whether Symons will switch his attentions to another target.
