BfB

Luke Sharry is playing for Grimsby Town reserves as he joins the plethora of players who – at this time of the season – face up to the idea that unless they can get someone else interested when their contract expires they will no longer be professional footballers.

Sharry will join the Mariners in the hope of winning a new deal for a club that – in all likelihood – will be playing non-league football next season. Down a division his blustering midfield play may prove useful, indeed it may have proved useful in League Two.

Sharry’s career at City has contained few reasons to suggest that he could be given a new contract by the Bantams. His chance came in the Johnstone’s Paint tie with Port Vale but a poor first half saw him substituted, never the return. The words “Blown it” were used, and were hard to argue with.

A right sided midfield who played inside – or perhaps an insider who was on the wing – City gave Sharry a chance and Sharry will not have been pleased with how that chance was grasped. He joins a list of players who promised much in pre-season and glimpses from the bench but ultimately went on their way. Craig Bentham, Robert Morgan, Tom Penford, Danny Forrest, Kevin Sanasy and on and on. The last ten years has been peopled with these players.

It would be tempting to look at the improvements to training facilities and suggest that City hampered our own youth development because of them – that with a decent pitch Forrest would be banging goals in and Bentham would be holding the midfield together – but that does not ring true.

Likewise it would be easy to look at the players and label them “not good enough” the idea being that had Sharry been obviously quality in the way that Joe Colbeck and Luke O’Brien – the past two players of the season – were then he would have broken into the team. This is probably true but only tells half a story.

For it is not the likes of Sharry, Penford, Bentham and the like who tried at City and ultimately moved on but rather the likes of Luke Cornwall, of Gareth Edds, of Michael Symes who replaced them. Moving out our young players only to move in the lads who had been moved out elsewhere. It is common up and down football and somewhere in North East Lincolnshire there is a kid with a right foot but no contract wondering what Luke Sharry has that makes him a better bet for a place next season.

The processes around young players seem to be at fault to me. The lads who come through the ranks are looked on as lottery tickets and if they do not produce a jackpot they are quickly cast aside only to be replaced by the tickets cast aside by another club.

The likes of Sharry, Morgan, Sanasy et al filled places in the squad and often went unused – less than a half dozen appearances between those three – but perhaps while the major aim of a youth set up is unearthing a Fabian Delph to make big profits in the future perhaps another – more realistic – aim should be to create a bunch of players who can fill a squad as Sharry did rather than sifting through other club’s cast offs after casting off our own.

I liked the look of Luke Sharry but – sadly, I guess – it seems he is on his way. He did not do what many people would call a great job at City but he did a job of adding depth to the squad and from the club’s point of view – financially as well as ethically when recruiting lads like him – is it not better to have that done by one of our youth rather than bringing in someone else to be reserve to Omar Daley and Scott Neilson?

And as supporters should we not stop looking at the lads coming through as hot young prospects that might be the next big thing and started giving them a chance to be members of our squad – to be footballers. We talk about the idea of a player being “good enough” without ever finishing the sentence.

Good enough for what? Good enough compared to whom? If the likes of Bentham and Penford were not good enough for League One then – obviously and manifestly – the replacements for those lads who built up a partnership for Colin Todd’s side at the end of one season were not either because twelve months later we were relegated.

The final thought is a comparison of Danny Forrest and Luke Cornwall as the proof that the grass is seldom greener on the other side.