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Talking Point

To Loan, or Not To Loan?

Blind Hammer looks at the Judgements Slaven Bilic and tom Wesley will have to make this summer.

Until recently the benefits of a Loan system in developing players was pretty much unquestioned. The well-trodden path to success for players arising out of the West Ham Academy like Jermaine Defoe and Frank Lampard was to spend periods on Loan at clubs like Bournemouth and Swansea respectively. Success in those lower league environments enabled players to develop mental and physical toughness to cope with the demands of top flight football.

For many years youth football has been seen as inadequate preparation for the rigours of senior football. The Under-23 league is regarded as technically challenging and good, but soft physically. The pressures are less savage, less is at stake. The realities of tough grizzled professionals are not represented.

Joe Hart described his early experience at Shrewsbury Town:

“At that level you understood that people, their families and their jobs were on the line. If you didn’t perform, things could get nasty. That was the environment I grew up in and it served me well.”

Playing in the lore leagues also give experience of the pressure of playing in front of a crowd who may well is impatient, frustrated, abusive and unforgiving. It certainly takes a certain kind of mental toughness to overcome this. Martin Allen described how it was learning how to cope with hostile reactions from the Upton Park crowd when he made a misplaced pass which was the turning point in his career. In his case he adapted his game, concentrated on tackling and winning the ball and kept passing the ball simple, rather than making a more adventurous pass forward with higher error potential.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of a crowd inhibiting Allen’s attempt to be more creative he found a method of playing which could survive pressures at the top level. He would never have found this need to adapt at Second team level.

Leroy Rosenior in his recent autobiography described the mental toughness you need to play in front of thousands who provide blows to your confidence and self-esteem, especially away from home. The football arena is a raw emotional place where adulation can quickly change to vile abuse.

Despite the benefits of a loan system, the picture for West Ham youngsters this year has been decidedly mixed. Tony Martinez was doing well at Oxford until serious injury badly interrupted his season. Luckily he recovered quickly enough to return to spearhead our promotion in the Development League Playoff. Josh Cullen has excelled at Bradford City to the extent that the fames have adopted our old “Dmitri Payet” song for him. Reece Burke also excelled at Bradford City but seems to have stalled again from injury during his most recent stay at Wigan.

George Dobson managed 21 appearances for Walsall but again returned to West Ham to figure in our Development Squad promotion run.

However the biggest concern has been in the loan performances of arguably our 2 biggest stars in the youth stable. The loans of Reece Oxford to Reading and Martin Samuelsen to Blackburn have been unmitigated disasters which may have caused a lot more harm than any potential good that they may have produced.

Oxford has only the briefest flirtation with the Reading first team and traumatically he was one of the defensive scapegoats hauled out of the team after Reading’s shocking 7-1 defeat at the hands of Championship also rans Norwich. Reading’s manager Stam was clearly no fan of Oxford, criticising variously his level of fitness, his level of intensity, allegedly inherited from his West Ham experience, his use of twitter and finally his level of commitment. Bilic went on record to say that he wished West Ham had never sent Oxford to Reading.

Martin Samuelsen had an even more difficult time at Blackburn Rovers. After a successful spell at Peterborough Samuelsen tried to make the step up to Blackburn only to find his stay terminated by Rovers. Blackburn Rovers, threatened with relegation throughout the Championship season was apparently a difficult environment. When Samuelsen limped metaphorically back to Peterborough after rejection by Blackburn they were appalled at the damage done to him. The confident and dangerous attacking player that they had passed onto Blackburn was now a shadow of his former self, devoid of confidence and attacking threat.

It may be that both Oxford and Samuelsen were pitched into a level that was too high for them to perform over a season in. However other more pragmatic factors may have been at work. We all know how working in a pressured environment may be difficult. Some young players may not be ready to adapt to all these pressures.

There seems little doubt that Oxford, having performed relatively successfully in the first team on limited occasions would have been better off staying at West Ham than spending months on the side-lines at Reading. Possibly the only beneficial outcome of the Reading experience for Oxford is that it may have been a reality check, counteracting any inflated views of his current capabilities possibly induced by Agent talk.

In the end the Loan system is only one model. Joe Cole was pitched into our first team without farming out to any lower level league team. He performed admirably until we were forced to sell after relegation. This may be a more constructive route for Oxford. If, as was allegedly the case, we sold Tomkins to clear a path for Oxford to make it into the first team this, rather than loaning out would seem to make logical sense anyway.

The situation for Samuelsen is less straightforward. He is completely untried at first team level and an extended loan at Peterborough or possibly Bradford City may make more sense.

Peterborough and Bradford appear to be environments in which our youngsters can excel and perhaps should enjoy preferred status in loan arrangements with us.

In the end though we should perhaps become less rigid in our approach. Instead of automatically looking for loans, we should recognise that there are risks as well as benefits. Perhaps we should be looking to pitch the occasional highly talented player, in the style of Southampton straight into the first team.

COYI
David Griffith

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