Surprise Surprise Arsenal had their chief scout at SMS for the Youth Game on Monday night, specifically to monitor Left Back Luke Shaw Well Arsene, I have a message - shove it up your french ass and develop your own players!
It must be pretty depressing for the local lads at Arsenal knowing that they stand virtually no chance of making it through. The Don will make sure that we are properly compensated for anyone who leaves Saints. I don't suppose they will be too keen to negotiate with him again.
Cortese fought tooth and nail to keep Oxo but he wanted to leave the club and because of the Don's superb negotiating skills we got a great deal but that's not our objective,to sell our academy stars hopefully we will keep them in the future if not sell them for a lot of money.
Exactly. Its a win-win for us having such a fantastic youth system and hence NC has made such a point of making it the vision of our future. If, in the situation with Chambo, there is no other option then we can sell the youth products but at a premium. When we get to the prem and re-establish, we will hopefully keep hold of the next talent to come through. Meanwhile Arsene and his greedy snake eyes can do one or pay up another 15m
Luke Shaw will be a superb player no doubt, but - just this once - why doesn't he stick it out here for a bit, get loads of useful experience in a confident team, and then still have the option later in life to transfer to a bigger club? Pisses me off that we don't reap the rewards for producing such talent, in that we never get to see them play the red & white stripes.
Invariably, if I can be bothered stick with an MOTD programme, after I've stumbled over it, it's because I've spotted, either an ex-Saint, or an ex-Saint academy, doing well for a PL team. There are quite a few. Err... let's see - Arsenal, Newcastle, Stoke, Fulham, Norwich, QPR, Swansea - all PL teams with ex-academy players. Have I left any out from the top flight..?
I remember when he made his debut in the second to last home game of the 05/06 season, when team was announced even us fans said 'WHO'!
He hasn't gone yet JDub! Arsenal scouts get everywhere, even more so in the FAYC when the gates are thrown open to the public. I don't suppose Shaw was the only one they were looking at either. The youth players no doubt will stick around longer with the direction the club is going in.
Scouts from all the big clubs are at Saints games every week. Same as our scouts are at other clubs games. This is nothing new.
You'd think they would invest the money they could bid for Shaw into their own academy, improving it to the level of ours or Crewe's/Watford's/Palace's.... Obviously not.
