- Aug 31, 2012
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You've got a point but re. Vorm but things are not that simple. We would have probably been paying him £40k a week to be the third choice keeper. We might well have offered him an extension for a lower wage but maybe he turned it down because A. he doesn't want to be third choice, and B. he might get a better contract with another club.the re-signing of vorm is yet another example of how baffling the approach to our academy has become.
now let me get this out of the way first, no i wouldn't feel particularly confident if whiteman or austin found themselves in goal for the first team but this isn't the point. clearly poch feels the same given we've had to resort to bringing vorm back but the two issues i have with this are a) why aren't we letting them go out on loan if that's the case??? and b) how on earth are they ever going to prove whether they can be relied upon if at the first sign of trouble all you're going to do is shit your pants and re-sign a player you've just let go? what's going to change in whiteman/austin's game from now and next year? or the year after? or the year after that if all they're doing is training and not being allowed to prove themselves capable or not somewhere else? we don't want to loan them but we don't want to play them either so is the plan to just keep them until they're mid 20s and then release them?
does john mcdermott not have a say in any of this or has he just become pochettino's yes man?
Now of course the circumstances are a lot different. Lloris is injured and Vorm hasn't yet found a new club to his liking. The point is, he still could have been rated more highly than the youth keepers, but not to the extent of £40k a week. Maybe it was just a case of 'we'll cross that bridge when we come to it' with the 3rd choice, and if Whiteman/Austin are better than the free agent options, then we stick with them.
Now i'm critical of our approach to youth but this could still have a perfectly reasonable explanation other than Poch bottling the youth players.