Given that it's pretty quiet, and we're not quite ready yet to go into the Chelsea stuff that will dominate the next few days, I got to thinking about our loan players. Sparked by the fact that West Ham have just signed a new right-back, and that Carl Jenkinson has struggled to get into the side this season, it strikes me that loan deals aren't so much a way for us to allow players develop – even if that is a part of it – as they are a consequence of the football landscape in which players can stagnate too easily. Maybe not so much in the case of Jenkinson, who had been part of the first team and was then deemed surplus to requirements, but more for the younger players. They reach a...
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