PAOLO Di Canio has confirmed that Billy Bodin is close to joining Torquay after the Gulls upped their offer for the 20-year-old.

As reported by the Advertiser yesterday, Torquay have steadily increased their bids for Bodin’s services after starting from a base of £40,000 around a fortnight ago.

The two clubs are now near to agreeing a price, believed to be in the region of £70,000 plus add-ons, and Di Canio said he wants the deal to go through for the sake of all involved.

“Torquay now increased their offer, we are close but we are not done yet,” he said.

“I hope as soon as we can we can go through because, fair enough, he is a young guy and he deserves to have a chance.

“He wants to go to a place where he thinks he can do good things because the manager knows him. I look after us and hope we can clear the situation and have some money to spend for if we need another player.”

Bodin did not travel with the Town squad to their Italian base on Sunday, and he was not involved in training with the club at Liddington last week either.

And Di Canio pressed home the point that he does not feel he should be training a player whose contract with Swindon expired on July 1.

“Someone, especially his father Paul, protested with the club because we didn’t send the text message to Billy Bodin to train him,” he said.

“He’s not a club player if he didn’t sign and doesn’t want to sign.

“He was, in my opinion, the man that said ‘don’t sign for Swindon’ because I don’t think Billy Bodin knows what to do in his life yet and I can’t understand the situation where the father and the son decide ‘don’t sign for Swindon, we want to go to Torquay’.

“There was also Crewe that wanted to sign him and offered quite good money. We said ‘wait a moment’ because he was worth a bit more because he is a talented player.

“We don’t train a player who doesn’t want to sign for us.”