We’ve given plenty of opportunities to our academy guys but at the moment, they’re really not making us look good. Rashford looks totally disinterested, Lingard was disruptive, Henderson is disruptive, Pogba didn’t give a feck, McTominay looks very limited and the less said about Greenwood, the better. These are the players who should technically be playing their bollocks off for us and not going behind our back being disruptive.
We don’t produce gold every year. Forget the early 90s breakthrough of half a dozen players from our academy. That’s a one off. That’s like winning the Euromillions jackpot. A lot of these boys disappear off the face of the earth after they leave their teenage years behind.
Its a huge risk to give Garner a new multi year contract based on him doing well in the Championship. His stock is reasonably high. He looks comfortable in the Championship and he was a key part of a team that got promoted, so there’s an uncertainty whether he’s good enough at Premier League level… The key part is there’s a huge difference between being a promoted PL team who could easily go back down and an established elite tier PL team. If we play him a small handful of times, you might get away with it in terms of harming his worth. If he looks out of depth after a full season with us, then the value goes down and if hes tied up in a nice juicy contract, then we’ve shot ourselves in the foot. We’re basically hoping he gets better because the teams that are more of his level cannot afford those wages, and the fashionable thing now is to run down your contract so he could leave for free and we’d have missed out on £20m that could have gone to buying someone.
We have to get better at this area. Look at Liverpool and how they handled Brewster.