Loans from "big" clubs
Nope, not feeling it at all. The parent club tries to dictate playing time and style. The players are getting recalled when they don't get what they want. The players are often not really bought in. The players are often not that good anyway. It's Premier League B teams in another form. They can jog on.
Let's sign our own players. Youngsters who need another chance. Aging experienced battlers. And the odd Leahy/Taff/Scowen.
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As I wrote another thread the other day I’m not against loans in their entirety but we seem to have made them the cornerstone of our approach to building our team this season and the results are mixed at best.
You have to wonder what the impact is on our own players. Sadlier must have been raging on Saturday and clearly TJay couldn’t be bothered to wait around any longer to see if might get a game at some point. After a promising pre-season Jack Young gets farmed out to Ayr because we’ve signed Breckin.
And then elsewhere we all bemoan the fact that we missed out on Al-Hamadi because he never got given a chance to show if he was any good.
No, we’ve not got it right I’m afraid.
We did pretty well in the loan market under Gaz 🤔
Of the starting eleven last Saturday only three players are loanees and of the seven substitutes only one is a loanee. Hardly an imbalance.
I don't think it's fair to criticise the loaning club for expecting certain things from the receiving club either. You can't dictate another club's style of play - and no one's doing that - but you do loan players out with a rough expectation of the playing time they'll get. At the end of the day, they're not our players - but as I say, we utilised the system very well under Gaz in general.
I agree, but you can criticise WWFC for knowing clubs loaning out players will have expectations and still then basing most of the transfer policy around loans.
I wonder how things would have turned out if we'd instead given proper chances to Jack Young, Christie Ward, TJ. Maybe even kept Curtis Thompson and/or Gape.
Yeah, I think we went too heavy on the loans this season
To be frank, I'm not sure what we've done right this season!
KONE
Signings this summer
Breckin - fail. Sent back early from loan
Boyes - meh. Sent back early from loan
Phillips - read Boyes
KVY - fail
Keogh - fail
Leahy - decent utility player, but for a 6 figure fee?
D Taylor - hasn't worked out
L Taylor - fail
Low - good buy with sell on value
Kone - as per Low
Sadlier - jury is out for me still
Overall- pretty piss poor record.
It always felt like GA got the majority of his signings right, can't say the same for MB and his head of recruitment Mitchell.
What is harder to work out is whether these are poor players at this level or whether the manager can't get them functioning as a unit. Maybe a bit of both.
spot on....Blooms record is obvious, signing in Jan apart from Kone are downgrades., still no idea how blooms and Assistant are still in a job...maybe Rob thinks that there are no relegations in league 1
I think the loan signings are evidence of a big budget cut and then it becomes slightly luck of the draw with the quality you get for untried players. Youngsters need 60-80 games to become consistent.
Breckin, Boyes, Philips have all been recalled by their parent clubs and then farmed out elsewhere. I'm not sure how that is MBs fault. People cannot have it both ways on a number of counts and we only have 11 spaces available in the starting XI.
I would have liked Boyes to stay, he would have done a very good job at LB compared to what Leahy is currently doing. Leahy would almost certainly have offered more in a midfield two than Wheeler.
Philips played 19 games for Shrewsbury last year. Given his performances here, overall, I'm surprised he won the young player of the season award. We need someone who can deliver more and now. Hopefully Lubala can.
Breckin was nowhere near good enough, so it will be interesting to see how he gets on at Stockport.
Low has been phenomenal and Leahy has been pretty decent up until Saturday.
Sadlier - agreed. I suspect he got dropped because he keeps taking a player on four times before getting a cross in. It can look good but it really doesn't help the team. How can the players attack the ball when they don't know when he will deliver. It was interesting to note on Saturday, he got the ball in first time or cut back onto his right once then delivered. If he does that more, then I think the team will benefit a lot.
Don't disagree with Keogh and L Taylor. Be interesting to see what happens with KVY in the long run but would be surprised if he makes many more appearances, hope to be proved wrong.
It's a bit hit and miss thus far but probably no different to most managers and especially those in their first season. You missed Potts and Kodua. Well Potts has been excellent and jury still out on Kodua.
Low started off incredibly, it was like we had stolen him. Since then he’s done ok. Is he better than Forino? Maybe on Forinos current form.
Leahey’s form has dipped since the head injury, before then he was superb. At left back he’s totally wasted.
I like Sadlier. His recent form made his dropping for Campbell a mockery and one that will rightly piss off team mates
The rest have been failures of different degrees.
I totally agree. After this season I hope we sign our own players and never depend on 5 loan players ever again. Even during Ainsworth’s time we had one or two loanees and some were excellent and others not so but we never had 5 all together.
To be fair to Matt, all five of them looked very exciting at the time of signing but at the end of the day only one of them (Potts), looks/looked comfortable in our style, maybe Boyes could also have made it.
I’m not sure I agree with the idea that us signing 5 loan players is because of a big budget cut.
There may have been a budget cut but it didn’t necessitate us having to go down this route, after all GA got us promoted from both League Two and League One on what I’m certain was a smaller budget without resorting to signing 5 players on loan.
There was a choice and personally I think it was the wrong one. I hope it’s not something we repeat. In that regard the signing of Beryl is to be welcomed as that’s more like the kind of signing we used to make.
After the success of Plymouth last season, it can't be said loans are a stupid option. MB was finding his feet through the summer, and with budget cuts, only made sense he went for loans to get a sense of things in his first window.
Surely Boyes going back was our call.
It'd be baffling for his club to recall him then send him to odds on relegation outfit Fleetwood, if we weren't serving some purpose for him.
There are 2 types of loans. Potts who is nailed on destined for higher things, everyone know that. And there are players who we might be considering a try before you buy arrangement. Campbell is not a Premier League player but if he drops down, puts the work in, has some good fortune he could get back to Championship. I was disappointed when he signed on loan as I hoped we could sign him permanently and develop him ling term.
Forgot to mention Campbell. Another totally perplexing signing in my eyes. Didn't pull up any trees last season and saw nothing to change my mind on Saturday.
I just see little evidence of a clear plan, which is backed up by our regular changes in formation. In terms of signings it just feels like we are flinging lots at the wall and hoping some stick, instead of carefully identifying what we really need and making maximum use of our budget.
I'm not really sure we ought to be including L. Taylor in any analysis. He arrived when we were desperate to add a stiker, due to injuries, outside of the transfer window. Who else do people think we could have signed at that point it time?
Okay, it didn't work out for us - but I've been told he played for expenses only, as he recognised he wasn't match fit.
Boyes became a victim of the change in formation as did Phillips to an extent when he couldn't get a regular starting birth, but both were average league 1.
Taylor has also turned out to be a pretty average league 1 player, playing for a below average league 1 team so don't see how that can be levelled at him.
Same can be said for Leahy & Sadlier.
Potts is an above average player at this level.
KVY, in my view the jury is still out as we haven't really seen enough of him.
Keogh became unnecessary after the switch back to a back 4, a blessing probably that he left.
Breckin failed.
I make that 2 fails, 1 better than expected and 4/5 about as expected from 8 signings so far (I feel like I've missed someone?).
Personally I think you'll find that's about par for new signings at any club, they never all excell whatever club you are and some do fail however good they are.
In fairness, if your expectation was middling averageness, then you would struggle to be disappointed!
Your middling average = RC sustainable? @Malone
But do I expect every signing we make (loan or permanent) to be above league 1 standard? No I expect them to be average league 1, because that's what we are.
And in a ggroup of 5 I'd not be surprised for 1 to be better than expected, 3 to be as expected and 1 to be below expectations.
Inevitably there are a lot of assumptions in here, but:
Presumably the plan during the summer was to create a squad that MB felt he could mould into the style of football he wanted us to play.
This was to occur at a time when the budget had (probably/possibly) been cut and when we had a relatively unknown and inexperienced manager.
Whether the original plan was to be so top heavy with loanees I personally doubt it (I think it likely we had a number of other targets who we weren’t able to attract) but as the season approached the loan market became more appealing/necessary
i would like to think that MB had enough faith in his abilities to think that he could take a cohort of well-football-educated youngsters and develop both them and the team in a way that he wanted to play.
Unfortunately, for a number of reasons (maybe the players themselves, maybe MBs inexperience/capabilities as a manager, maybe bad luck) it only gave the faintest of hints that it would work.
We are now left with a team and management seemingly lacking in any confidence. More concerning to me is that players who should be kicking on and improving (Max, Forino, Low for example) seem to be going backwards. Who seriously would look now at any of our contracted players (excepting Scowen) and think that they would be worth a fee.
All is not yet lost, but I do hope that we have learnt some lessons from last summer, whoever is in charge in a few months time.
POTD, if not the entire season.
Great post - this does feel like a needless misstep.
My take on the thinking is that loan players were a necessary stop gap allowing our development players time out on loan this season hoping that when they come back they will be more experienced and toughened up, ready to take more of a role in the first team squad. Presumably the management's thinking, accepted by the Couhigs.
Extending the contracts of 4 of them suggests this is the case. A medium / long term view towards developing the team.
Goodness me, someone who actually understands and accepts how the loan system can be beneficial!
One look at the league table suggests the loan system has not been beneficial for us.
I think that one of the problems with the loan system is that it highlights how unfinished a lot of these players are. We hear Man City talent we are expecting Cole Palmer to walk in and not Breckin.
Someone wisely said to me that there has to be another team for the good kids to play against, and I suppose we are getting some of those.
I’ve said it before, every prem or high level youth team has to have 16 players minimum. Have to have a keeper, left back, left wing etc. The coaches are backing maybe 3 or 4 specific, targeted players to make it but they need a team, so there are lots of kids hanging around hoping to make it…until they don’t. It’s brutal.
Jack ‘if ‘ya want some I’ll give it to ‘ya’ Young joins the Raiders on loan.