Very good post Nige......I'd agree that with the exception of Roberts and as Cashy points out, Brett Ormerod, very few of recent bright young things have gone on to rip up trees..... so to speak.
I think a balance has to be acquired by looking at the bigger picture....With the home attendances as they are at the moment, the club has to look at nurturing talent like we have at the moment and look to get the best possible price when the talent moves on to supposedly better things.
That said some of the examples have ended up plying their trade below where we are now and; there was one notable exception from the lads Nige mentioned... a.k.a. Anthony Barry....!!!
It's nice to hear that the club are supposedly putting better offers of longer term contracts on the table to the likes of Jimmy Ryan and Ray Putterell....It would be even nicer to think that we could keep hold of the likes of such players for a couple of years, in which time we could hopefully move another rung up the ladder into League One and hopefully the gates would regularly get to somewhere around the mark that they were during the latter part of the Conference winning season.
That said....it will always be the lot of lower league clubs (leagues one and two) to find these unpolished diamonds and brush them up and sell them on. Crewe and to a lesser extent..Bury have done it for years !! It would be nice to think that the club seems to have learned from the mistake of not offering the likes of Bobby Grant and Symes longer term deals and seeing them go on the cheap; and in Symes' case for zilch
A final thought... I wonder if Coley has:
a) pondered the thought of getting Bobby back on loan. As he doesn't seem to figure much in Scunthorpe's plans ( and the fact that whoever negotiated the clauses on that deal wants shooting !!- by that I mean the clause which stipulates that Scunthorpe pay an extra amount if they got promoted to the Premier league!!!) what about getting them to loan him back to us till the end of the season with Scunthorpe paying a large part of Bobby's wage????. Surely better for the lad to get regular first team football rather than reserve team games and the obvious benefit for ourselves....Haven't Rochdale done that with a few of the lads they've sold recently???
b) Contemplated giving Chris Turner a decent run...The lad has shown he has the talent and for me at least, I think is a better prospect than McConville????
Your thoughts please, ladies and gentlemen...