Stoke City chairman Peter Coates insists they have no regrets letting West Ham United hero Demba Ba slip through their hands.
Stoke pulled the plug on Ba's £7.1m move from German club Hoffenheim in January because of concerns over a previous knee injury.
Coates told The Sentinel: "There are no qualms about the decision we made.
"We would have taken the player had he passed the medical. But we were strongly advised by our medical team that it was a risk we could not take.
"You cannot spend large sums of money on a high-risk basis. We were disappointed, though, because we wanted to sign the player and the eventual decision was nothing to do with is ability."
