Quote Originally Posted by the other bob wilson View Post
I brought Ajayi up because I read about Flint being a "very shrewd" signing. Personally, I don't see how the signing of any 30 year old British centreback who has never played in the Premier League for a fee which could rise to £6 million could ever qualify as "very shrewd", but that's by the by here.

Currently, there's a twenty five year old centreback playing for a side that is above us in the table who it appears has improved leaps and bounds since we let him go for peanuts just two years ago and yet, apparently, we are being asked to believe that this is some sort of fluke whereby it's unfair to ask questions about why we let him go.

Let's not forget either that we signed another centreback in the summer who Neil Warnock was saying last week can be at the club for a decade - does our manager realise that Curtis Nelson will be 36 then? Nelson appears to me to be a "one for the future" type signing, yet he's older than Ajayi and, on the face of it, appears to be a worse player.
I agree with most of that but I'm not sure how we were meant to bring Ajayi through to the level he's at now. He played over a hundred games for Rotherham, even if he'd been a Warnock type centre half how many times would he have played ahead of Morrison, Bamba or Manga over the past couple of seasons (or Gunnarsson in central midfield)? He was unlucky with his loan spells here; he suffered a head injury at Wimbledon, Crewe couldn't afford to keep him longer than three months and then Trollope thought he'd need him for the first team here so he missed out on a loan move at the start of that season.

He settled in well at Rotherham but his contract only had months to go here by then. Why would Warnock want to keep him if he didn't figure in his plans and even if he saw potential would Tan have sanctioned a long contract extension so we could keep sending him out on loan for another two years? Why would Ajayi want to sign a new one here if he wasn't going to play anyway? Maybe we got a percentage of the sell on fee by letting him go a couple of months early but other than that I'm not sure what else we could've done. Jeopardise promotion by playing him ahead of better players in the hope he came good?

It was a shame he went, I enjoyed watching him play. My worry at the time was that a new manager might come in within a year or so and want that kind of player but as Warnock ended up staying for another three years that's irrelevant now. If the next manager wants to play out from the back he won't be grateful for what Warnock's left him but it's hard to be too critical of decisions that led to a promotion.