When we are crying out for a good striker one of our own goes and scores 4 goals for man utd u23s. Reading the comments they reckon he is going to be a superstar. SD will be remembered for many years for all the wrong reasons because of stuff like this
Losing our academy products is ine if the worst things about the relegation to this league and Donald's reign. I know it would always be hard to keep them when Arsenal, Liverpool and Man Utd come knocking and we are in league 1 but a parent of one of the lads used to come in rtg in the early days to say that the club made no effort to keep them. Didn't even call them to discuss staying iirc. Think the sad thing is it was a bad situation that we were always going to have a tough fight in our hands to keep them but it helped with a bit if cash coming in so there was no fight. Tell the fans its inevitable sorry. Losing our best talent from the academy is criminal we should have been telling these lads if they good enough and proved it the team to get back to the premier league would be built around them over the next few years. This is without taken into account what happened with Maja when he did make it. Would Mumba be better under a decent coach?
I don't think he could do anything about it could he? Not defending him as he's a cock but if a premier League club especially man Utd comes in for a young lad in league 1 who doesn't have a contract then there's absolutely no chance of keeping him
Maybe the players would've gone anyway but if it's right about not putting up a fight got them to stay, would you have, I don't think if I was them I would. However, you have the biggest argument going for you at the time - "you're playing for your home club, where would you get more first team experience? Here or playing for Man Utd? We're in League one, stay here, get into the first team, bang the goals in, make a name for yourself and if Man Utd still want you, you have our blessing". We had the perfect scenario to blood good young players in the first team alongside some decent professionals (not some that we did buy btw) get experience and hopefully get out of this league prior to now and allow these young kids to make a name for themselves here
Words coming out from those within the club say there was no fight to keep our young stars, and there was an effort to make what money we could out of them to balance the books. It was a very short sighted approach which we will regret for years.
The lad who went to Liverpool said the same thing. No contact from the club and effort made to talk them into staying. Said the contrast between how much we made him seem wanted compared to Liverpool was night and day. She was convinced the club wanted him to go.
