Loan Watch 2019-20

How is Amos doing? Started the season brilliantly but then picked up a series of injuries and it's all gone pretty quiet ever since.

 

He's been in and out of the side in recent games, but he's been getting reasonably consistent minutes

 

Cameron Carter-Vickers wasn't in the squad for Stoke's 0-0 draw with Reading. He's injured, isn't he?
Luke Amos played 90 minutes in QPSpurs' 5-3 loss to Barnsley, scoring twice
Leeds drew 3-3 with Cardiff. You can guess the rest
Anthony Georgiou was an 88th minute sub in Ipswich's 20-1 loss to Bristol Rovers
Jack Roles was a 70th minute sub in Cambridge's 1-1 draw with Cheltselfharm Cheltenham
George Marsh played 90 minutes in Orient's 0-0 draw with Bradford

 

The relevant timestamps are 0:28 and 1:04

 

Clarke with a goal and assist for Leeds... U23s.

1st Jan he needs to be recalled and either utilised here (we could probably give more minutes than Leeds at the moment!) or sent to a club who’ll actually use him in their first team.

 

Our dealings with players trying to step up into senior football have been pretty poor over the last few yearsand Clarke's loan to a Leeds, already stuffed full of loanees tops it off. A number of promising talents just haven't progressed and we need to improve on this right now.

Is there any point in keeping Troy Parrott at the club for the rest of this season if he's not going to get senior playing experience? Likewise with Clarke and Skippy. I'd prefer to send these lads out on loan somewhere they're likely to play, especially if we're going to select players like Wanyama and Rose to sit on the bench ahead of them.

 

Poch's philosophy was that players will gain far more training with top quality team-mates than they will playing with below-par adopted team-mates from the lower leagues. To an extent, I understand where he was coming from, but at the same time find it strange how quickly he seemed to forget that a large percentage of his first squad came through the loan system: Kane, Mason, Livermore and Townsend. But then on the other hand, the past few years have seen multiple academy players go out to lower league sides and still barely clock up any minutes. So we're a bit stuck in a halfway house with two policy-pies in the oven, neither of which are remotely baked.

 

Leeds only had two loanees before they loaned in Clarke - it's the three they loaned in afterwards that is the issue, given clubs can only include five loaners in their match day squads

 

A cynical part of me thinks Leeds deliberately done this. They’ve held a grudge with us ever since the Lennon and Rose signings and I can’t help but feel that they demanded Clarke back on loan purely to **** him and us over in terms of his immediate development. It just doesn’t make sense for a club to demand a player back on loan only to give him about 70 mins of first team football in the first half of the season, especially when it was common knowledge they were trying to secure loan deals for Harrison and Costa at the same time.

In general though the handling of our youth has been ****ing abysmal for far too long and it’s cost us some top prospects.

The best prospects have been kept around the first team with the intent of supposedly improving around top players but then only to rarely feature in matches which has inevitably resulted in a player like KWP, who’s now 23, still playing at the level of a 19 year old (with Skipp now having 1 and a half seasons of the KWP treatment, followed by Tanganga and Parrott this season). Whilst the loan system has seemingly just been “send them to the first team who’s made a loan bid” more so than actually doing some research to see if the enquiring club genuinely has space for them.

What I think we need to do is go back to 8 or so years ago and strike up deals like we had with the likes of Yeovil, Orient, Swindon and Millwall, in which we send multiple players to the same clubs who were in need of personnel. Many of our lot benefitted in some capacity from this, both either to boost their prospects of returning to the first team or just to aid them in their footballing development. Yeovil at one stage had Obika, Mason and Townsend. Orient had Kane and Carroll. Millwall had Kane and Mason. Swindon had a load off us over a period of about 2 seasons which included the likes of Mason, Pritchard and Luongo... We need more of this. It had a far higher success rate than just sending a player out to a random team for a season only for them to get a pathetic amount of minutes on the pitch and come back no better than when they left.

 

Our Loan system, youth development and scouting network are piss poor

Someone isn’t paying attention to the details.

If we’re not going to be the big spenders then ENIC need to pay this method of finding talent a lot more attention than they seem to have done

Infact just pay everything that leads to the team improving some more attention...well done on the Guns and Roses gig btw

 

Wouldn’t say our scouting system is bad to be fair but the loan and development definitely is.

We’ve built the majority of this side up with players who have essentially cost far less than their market value worth so I think the scouts deserve a lot of credit for that, as did Poch for making it work with those players.

But when it comes to developing our own youth, either through internal or external measures, it’s been a sham for the last 3-4 years and needs to be rejigged. Not sure who’s to blame, whether it was Poch/ McDermott/ both/ someone else but we need to do better or at least go back to our old ways of striking deals with affiliate clubs to send multiple players too as that had a far higher success rate than what we’re doing now.

 

"Already stuffed with" was obviously incorrect on my part but the point stands. Leeds had loaned in 4 or 5 the previous season.

Maybe, if we had better management of loans, we could have foreseen the possibility and had a condition in the loan contract about the number of loanees they took or got him out of there when the others turned up?

From the outside, it looks like we did Leeds and Bielsa a favour and they had little intention of reciprocating if it didn't suit them. It's a bit hit and miss on our part for a £10m asset. Now, we need to get the kid out of there and on to somewhere he can get on the pitch and he's not the only one.

 

Leeds genuinely look like a team where management and coaching don't communicate at all, which explains why Clarke's not even their most cack-handed handling of a loan this season

If anything I'd say Georgiou is the one we messed up the most, as Ipswich were always going to be up there this season and that tends to lock in a starting xi

 

Luke Amos: QPSpurs vs Charlton (Saturday 3:00pm) & Reading (Thursday 7:30pm)
Cameron Carter-Vickers: Stoke vs Middlesbrough (Friday 7:45pm) & Sheffield Wednesday (Thursday 3:00pm)
Jack Clarke: Leeds vs Fulham (Saturday 3:00pm) & Preston (Thursday 5:15pm)
Anthony Georgiou: Ipswich vs Portsmouth (Saturday 3:00pm) & Gillingham (Thursday 3:00pm)
Kazaiah Sterling: Doncaster vs Accrington Stanley (Saturday 3:00pm) & Peterborough (Thursday 3:00pm)
Jack Roles: Cambridge vs Orient (Saturday 3:00pm) & Swindon (Thursday 3:00pm)
George Marsh: Orient vs Cambridge (Saturday 3:00pm) & The Pit Of Footballing Misery That Is Colchester (Thursday 1:00pm)

We can probably rule out Clarke featuring, not because it's not like he's featured at all this season, but because reports suggest he'll be recalled in January

 

Cameron Carter-Vickers wasn't in the squad for Stoke's 2-1 loss to Middlesbrough. Injury, or are we going on a mass recall spree in January?

 

Luke Amos played 78 minutes in QPSpurs' 2-2 draw with Charlton, picking up a booking
Jack Clarke wasn't in the squad for Leeds' 2-1 loss to Fulham, which has no doubt sped up his recall
Anthony Georgiou wasn't in the squad for Ipswich's 1-0 loss to Portsmouth
Jack Roles was a half time sub in Cambridge's 3-2 loss to Orient, scoring their first goal
George Marsh played 77 minutes in Orient's 3-2 win over Cambridge, picking up a booking

 

Oh yeah, I forgot that Jack Clarke was from Leeds...

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Leeds have confirmed that Jack Clarke is being recalled in January

 

Will be a statement of intent from Jose to put Clarke in the starting XI in the Boro FA Cup tie.

 

More likely he'll be loaned to a team that will give him minutes

Hell, minute would suffice...