da dobrowin： [ad_pod ]
da dobrowin： Speaking to Football Insider, Noel Whelan has urged Leeds not to sell Kalvin Phillips and Jack Clarke this summer.
Speculation has been rampant regarding the two players’ futures as Tottenham have reportedly been sniffing around the winger, whilst the midfielder has garnered plenty of Premier League interest.
What’s been said then?
The BBC Radio Leeds pundit urged his former club to change their stance on selling their promising young talents.
“There’s been a theme of Leeds selling our best home-grown stars for the last four or five years and it has to stop,” Whelan told Football Insider.
“We cashed in on Lewis Cook, Sam Byram, Ronaldo Vieira, Charlie Taylor, you can go back even further than that, and it’s impossible to build a winning side that way.
“There are weaknesses in our side and we have to strengthen. It’s not about selling, it’s about adding. Sell one or two players, and then build around the young players like Phillips and Clarke.
“Please don’t sell them. There’s been too much short-term thinking in the past. That has to change.”
Absolutely right
The 44-year-old is spot on when giving his team advice on what they should do in the transfer window.
For far too long the Yorkshire club have let their exciting academy graduates slip through their fingers, and it may well be what is holding them back from a return to the Premier League.
You feel that Marcelo Bielsa’s squad last season was one or two players away from achieving their goal, and if the Whites hadn’t sold some of their top talents in recent years, they could’ve made all the difference.
It’s time for the Whites to stop being pushed around by clubs that aren’t even as big as them. Cook went to Bournemouth and Taylor went to Burnley, for example. There’s no way that a club of Leeds’ stature should be forced to sell to teams such as these who are only a rung above them in the English football ladder.
Of course, it is easier said than done and money talks, and it’s probably a fair sale if Leeds let Clarke move to Spurs for £20 million, but selling Phillips to either Norwich or Bournemouth would be inexcusable.