Every time a football club with a foreign manager is struggling, pundits will invariably suggest they need to give young British talent a chance.
But what if we’ve got it all wrong? What if, instead of managers, we should be bringing in young British talent to replace the pundits.
Jason Mohammad and Robbie Savage were in the BBC studio for 606 over the weekend when they got a call from a very disillusioned but very coherent Swansea City fan, 10-year-old William.
By the end of the call, things had moved from ‘let’s see where this is going’ to ‘give the kid Savage’s job before someone else snaps him up’. At least that’s what it felt like.
Following the Swans’ league defeat against Brighton, which left Paul Clement’s team in the Premier League relegation zone, the young fan got to the core of what has gone wrong since the summer.
“What I find really disappointing is in the transfer window, they lost Gylfi Sigurdsson, who I would say last season was one of our best players,” he began.
“Fernando Llorente went to Spurs, but he’s not getting much game time, and we replaced both of them with Wilfried Bony, who hasn’t played for two seasons, and you expect him to score 10 goals a season.”
Mohammad and Savage were impressed, as was reporter Jonathan Overend.
Overend listened to William explain that, “If we play with the passion and quality we played with today… then we will probably go down,” and invited him in to the studio to show off his punditry expertise at a later date.
It’s worth listening through to the end on this one.
(Images: Rex Features)
