Don’t be Hastie
MOTHERWELL v HAMILTON
“We haven’t given up hope. Jake has decisions to make. We’ve put a contract offer on the table – the best of our ability – and he’s attracting a lot of attention which his form rightly deserves.
“That’s the nature of things when you’re at Motherwell. We must be doing something right and Jake must be doing something very right when he’s being linked with the clubs he is being linked with.
“We’re doing our very best to convince him to stay. Jake is a boy who has been at this club a long time, he has a great relationship with the staff, with myself, he’s playing regular first-team football and he’s doing very, very well.
“That’s the lure. Everyone has to make decisions in football but for the here and now he’s a Motherwell player and concentrating very much on the Hamilton game which is huge.
“We can never compete financially with the teams the speculation has been BY GAVIN BERRY about. But what we can do is say we have an extremely good coaching staff beneath what people see and the hard work that goes into that.
“There is the opportunity to play firstteam football and in an environment where he is loved and very well liked by the crowd and everybody here.”
Hamilton lost Lewis Ferguson to Aberdeen and got around £250,000 plus add-ons after a tribunal – despite Accies chairman Les Gray valuing him at £1.25million. Hastie has been at Well since age nine – five more years than Ferguson’s Accies stint – and Robinson said: “We won’t lose any of our young players for nothing and Jake in particular.
“All of our young players are protected by compensation rules. With the Bosman ruling clubs are free to speak to people and they have decisions to make – but we are well protected.
“It may become a bit of a lottery but I don’t make those decisions and I’m not on the board. There are tribunals and if it is cross-border there are set fees for categories. It should be the same here.
“If a club is category A there should be a certain standard of money that comes to the people who develop them.”
But Robinson insists Hastie won’t be sidetracked as the youngster admitted the speculation has been strange.
Hastie said: “It’s been quite weird really since I’ve started to come into the team, I have to pinch myself sometimes.
“If someone had told me a couple of months ago this would all be happening I would probably have told them to shut up. It’s been a good couple of months.
“The boys keep my feet on the ground and so does the gaffer, right enough. He’s always slaughtering my Instagram!”