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As always with these matters, we don’t see what the coaches see on and off the training ground, so we can only go off what we see on a Saturday afternoon and ultimately, we have to trust the coaching staff, their experience and game knowledge — which I do.
I totally get the Aleksić loan move.
He’s still a young lad and was trying to find his way into the Championship set up, so to expect him to be in a competitive position for the Premier League is possibly asking too much for now.
That said, we should certainly be keeping hold of him as he may well turn into a very good player, and he certainly shows speed, endeavour and no little skill.
Ekwah is more problematic — the problem being that I like him!
Of course he wasn’t the finished article (hence the loan move) and he needed to work on his tracking back, but as an example, I took a Manchester United friend of mine to the Stadium of Light a few times when Ekwah was playing.
I’m always interested what friends think who have little connection to Sunderland and on more than one occasion, he said “Who’s he?” or “I like him”.
He even got to know his name, which was a first, and at that time under Tony Mowbray, Ekwah was class (not to overstate the adjective too much). I even wanted my song for him to take off: _Voulez vous couche avec moi…Ekwah!_
Sadly, it’s not to be, but we have to trust in the wisdom of those in charge, and let’s be clear: there’s a player there and I hope it doesn’t come back to haunt us.
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**Mark Wood says…**
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I think with Aleksić, it makes absolute sense for him to go on loan for a season and get regular game time.
He’s been on the fringes of our first team ever since he arrived but has always been restricted to cameo roles, and when he’s been given starts — particularly towards the end of the season — he really didn’t take it with both hands.
It won’t be any easier in the Premier League, and depending on how our recruitment pans out over the summer, he could find himself shuffled further down the pecking order. Therefore, a season away in more familiar surroundings can only help his development.
With Ekwah, it’s one of those where I think back to the player that first broke into our team at the end of the 2022/223 season with some barnstorming performances — Luton at home in the playoff semi-final for one — and then followed it up at the start of the next season.
Remember his performance and two goals in the 5-0 demolition of Southampton? But that was as good as it got for him. After that, he had the longest running ‘dead leg’ in the history of medical science and we never saw him hit his ‘A game’ again.
For someone that played over fifty games for us, I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times we saw him bringing that to the park, which is a real pity because when he did he looked like ‘the man’ in our midfield.
He looked raw, but could receive and turn with the ball with a group of opposition players around him — just like Jobe Bellingham, but the average or below par performances far outweighed the good.
Why he couldn’t bring a consistently good performance level onto the pitch is another question which we can only guess the answer to. It has to be pointed out when he joined us two and half years ago, he’d just turned twenty one but Sunderland were his third senior club in England — and fourth overall if you include Nantes.
On top of this, we were the club that handed him his senior debut of any kind, and couple of comments caught my eyes.
One was from Régis Le Bris when he first went out on loan, where I think he mentioned that Ekwah seemed to have belief that he should be playing at the top level in Europe.
Then Tony Mowbray talked about not being able to get some of our ‘overseas’ players to integrate into the first team hub, yet he’s seemed happy in France and by all accounts had a good season with relegated St Etienne in Ligue 1.
So could it be down to his mental approach on Wearside as to why he didn’t kick on with us when he had the tools to do it? We can only guess.
He wouldn’t be the first player that showed a lot of promise at first but didn’t play to their potential, and we had plenty of them the last time we were in the Premier League. Now at twenty three, he needs to go somewhere and grasp the opportunity with both hands, as I can’t see him getting game time here.