HoundURZZZZmuirinho
I think he was keen on the kind of players that fitted into the Dutch philosophy, and less keen on ones, like Cooper, that didn't. It might not have helped Cooper, but I think without Gourlay, more of the academy lads would have had a better chance. Whether they would have been the right choices out of the academy is of course a different question.
I'm still in two minds about Cooper, I bet, you know, if he'd stayed, he'd have been a fairly frequent scapegoat.
He’d just come off the back of a poor finish to the season (2015/16) where he was making mistake after mistake, costing us plenty of goals and the chance to get to the FA Cup Semi final by giving away a penalty and getting sent off
So I agree that if he’d stayed into the next season, he would have come into it under pressure to perform and a likely scapegoat. It’s why I rarely understand the “we shouldn’t have sold him, look how he’s doing now” argument because the majority of the time, they wouldn’t have developed at the same rate here
Cooper was clearly a good player though. You'd expect the mistakes to improve over time with the correct coaching and guidance. Definitely one who I thought we should have invested more time and effort in
Trying to remember the timelines, but I think we loaned him to Millwall, where he did well and then they picked him up on the relative cheap when they went up. We really should have had a better look at him after that loan
He may have been a good player but once you start making mistakes, it’s hard to get out of that mentality which is why I doubt he would have made a career here
One or two mistakes every so often and your point would be more valid but his problem was that he was making at least one blunder every single game
You could see he was playing within his shell and cautiously in the cup game against Plymouth in Stam’s first season in fear of messing up, and I’m not sure he featured for us again after that
You’re right that we could have had another look at him after his loan spell at the end of the 2016/17 season. But we had McShane and Moore who were better than him, Blackett who was beginning to adapt to the role and Ilori who was supposed to be good. That would have left him 5th choice, with very little game time and hence very little chance to develop
Of course, given Ilori, Blackett and McShane’s erratic form/injuries, he may have been given a chance but I doubt it
Selling him was the best move for the club at the time and the best move for him