Whilst you’re right, alexthegreat, I’m not sure that any size of contract we offer could stop a lad moving to a club like Chelsea. Their contract would obviously pay significantly more than we could probably pay our top players!!!

He will think his career will be fit from playing at a bigger club (which it might do) and, if he turns out to fall by the wayside, he will have earned himself a decent amount of cash for wherever he ends up playing. As for us, it’s a guaranteed £300k, with add ons if he does well. I hope this is the case, but he might have turned out not to progress, or pick up a string of injuries, in which case we would have got nowt.

My main regret is that we won’t have had the pleasure of watching him play first team football in Alex red... unless he returns on loan!