E young players made the I’m hoping, not expecting
though those last two are already 21, Stryjek is confined to the bench at Accrington Stanley and Maja was actually recruited from Fulham).
I hope they all have fabulous careers; preferably with Sunderland. We shall see.
Going back not many years, we heard the names Liam Agnew, Louis Laing, Blair Adams, Billy Knott, Ryan Noble, Adam Mitchell, Jordan Cooke and Adam Reed. There were many, many more.
Such hopefuls were regularly championed with comments such as: “Why aren’t they give a chance?” and “They can’t be any worse.”
These gentlemen now represent respectively; Harrogate Town, Hartlepool, Hartlepool again, Lincoln, Gateshead, Spennymoor Town, Luton and Faya FC of the Philippines.
Nothing wrong with that and good luck to them. They all play to a standard that the likes of me could only dream of. But surely we can reasonably conclude that Sunderland were proved correct about them, because they haven’t been disproved. They were simply not good enough to merit a first team chance on Wearside.
This may sound brutal or even cruel. That’s professional football.
Martyn Waghorn made his first Sunderland appearance a decade and one day ago. Since then the only home grown players to genuinely establish themselves at the club were Pickford, Jordan Henderson and Jack Colback.
Three in 10 years. That’s pretty bad.
John Egan and Conor Hourihane are reportedly doing well at Brentford and Aston Villa in the Championship.
But neither player, along with Waghorn, was Premier League material. And as that was the league that Sunderland were in at the time, the club can hardly be blamed for dispensing with them.
Similarly, it’s doubtful that Lynden Gooch and George Honeyman would still be there if the drop had been averted last season.
Today, with SAFC limping into 2018, the latest cornucopia of youthful hope may yet provide salvation where the transfer market won’t. Maja and Asoro especially have shown great promise.
As for the others, well, it’s up to them to prove me wrong. Hope always lives. But Sunderland supporters have never confused hope with expectation.