Without wishing to sound wise in hindsight, there's things to learn from this situation. Diamonds can be found in the rough, as McBurnie and Wilson showed last year in this division and Tammy Abraham the season before. Players stepping seamlessly out of u23 football into the men's game. However, it's a risk to see whether a player can do this quickly and at the desired level.
Wilson is a couple of years older than Woodburn, and has league games under his belt. Mount is the same age, but had a full season in the dutch top division last year, so both are less of a risk. Same goes for Henderson and Blackman, they'd both played a reasonable amount of league games, albeit at a lower level. Also Blackman wasn't 19.
We are now in an unenviable situation regarding Woodburn. He's been at the club for 1/4 of a season, and seems to moving further away from a first team start. He is obviously highly rated by Liverpool & the welsh set up, and his situation is now being discussed in the press and we seem to be catching undeserved flack. Him returning to play for Liverpool's u23's might have seemed like a good idea at the time and done with the best of intentions, but it seems a bit snidey in the cold light of day and looks as if Liverpool are making a point.
If, for whatever reason CW doesn't think he's currently up to it, then i'm 100% behind CW. All I would say is if we have a young player on loan, as brutal as it sounds, they need to be doing the business from day one, as i'd rather we take a punt on our own young players and spend time blooding them slowly into the squad, which we of a long term benefit to us.
We are not blessed with money and shouldn't be paying for somebody else's player who isn't playing, we are also a shallow squad and we need everyone in it to be of use now. It might be best for all concerned, as in the case CCV, to send him back to his parent club, before a molehill gets turned into a mountain.
