A handful of West Ham youngsters are using their Championship season to make their break through into regular first team football, amongst them Mohamadou Kanté and Divine Mukasa.
Kanté, the young star transferred to West Ham for a meagre £800,000 under Tim Steidten’s ‘astute’ eye (he had to get one right under the law of averages..) has become a regular in Nuno;s line up with assists and goals already flowing for the twenty year-old. Mukasa, conversely, is s loan signing only, despite heralding from West Ham’s academy.
How the Hammers would like to get him back permanently: Whilst rumours persist that there’s a gentleman’s agreement between the two sides, nothing formal exists to keep the teenager at West Ham after the season end when his loan officially expires.
Report suggests Mukasa needs to complete 90 minutes more often: I’d beg to differ IMHO
According to a scouting report complied by thefalse9.com the young Manchester City midfielder has plenty to work on in the meantime:
“What .. Mukasa..needs to improve
The obvious area is lasting a full match. By FotMob’s figures he played 85 at Swansea, 68 against QPR, 68 at Millwall, 51 against Fulham in the EFL Cup, 66 at Bolton, 89 against Derby and 90 against Wrexham.
He’s often taken off, and our view is that building his game across a full match is the next step.”
With Championship games coming so fast one after another, Nuno is doing a sterling job managing his teenager’s minutes yet it is a surprising statistic to see Mukasa has only once lasted a whole game.
With an abundance of midfielders, the plain fact is that West Ham are winning games with Divine Mukasa working at 75%: Very little reason, in my uninformed opinion, to risk his fitness at this stage of the season with another 35 games to come.
Strength on the substitutes’ bench is one of West Ham’s key advantages over opponents, as we saw on Saturday with Nuno able to call on Taty, Austbø and Soucek for the last quarter of the game.
Why risk anyone’s fitness – least of all a still-developing teenager – when the team are doing very nicely just as they are. Let Mukasa influence games through talent without working the young man to exhaustion. If it aint broke, don’t fix it!