Wigan said to me at the start the prices needs to reflect the fact that we don’t want to sell him,” Donald revealed. “We had a meeting instigated by somebody close to Wigan, who told us he was available at £1m. Jack [Ross] said, ‘God, yeah.’
“We went in twice below £1m and they said, ‘Look, that’s the figure.’ We then put in a bid and they said he’s not for sale at that price. We pushed it to about £1.5m and they said no. That was a good week before the transfer deadline.
“The we seriously looked at a couple of other targets and put a couple of bids in. We enquired about another player and we were told £5m.
“People (at various clubs) were saying it was January tax and Sunderland tax. It was just getting really silly.
“I left it as late as I could, then I thought, ‘Nah, we need this lad (Grigg). I’d like to try and do this for Jack.’ We got to the last day and I pushed our bid up to two (million) and a bit more.
“I left it as late as I could for the last offer. I think it was seven, and they said ‘yeah’.”