Howe said: “Anthony needs a bit of a break but by the time he comes back, he’ll be ready to go. He’s such an important player for us. We didn’t want to lose anybody. Why would we want to lose our best players? We fought really hard to make the right decisions but in those last few weeks it was very, very difficult.
“It was a very difficult last couple of weeks of June. There was a lot of uncertainty and we didn’t know what was going to happen. The rules forced us to do things we didn’t want to do. I want to make that clear we didn’t want to sell any of the players we sold. Absolutely not. Why would we want to sell any of our promising young players? Elliot’s someone we’ve invested a lot of time in and it defied the inner feeling we all had associated with the club, it felt wrong.
“In the end it’s been as good as we could have hoped for in terms of us not being hit with a points deduction which was of, course, of paramount importance. But we need to make sure we’re not in that position again.”
