Quote Cosmonaught="Cosmonaught"Ostick will be off at the first chance he gets.
The club treated him shockingly at the end of last season, and I'm sure any loyalty he had has vanished.
He's playing out of his skin and if a move to SL comes his way then I couldn't really blame him if he went.'"
I'm not sure you can blame the club as a whole. I won't pretend to know the full facts but Ste McCormack overlooked the younger players time after time. One of 1st things he did at Widnes was to get rid of the youth players that were there at the time. Even last year, when we had to start from scratch, the younger lads were by and large ignored when it came to the league campaign. The season may have started with many youngsters in the team, but when we went to Celtic in the league, we didn't have one youth player in the squad - even Celtic had 1 or 2 - how embarrasing.
A few stats from the league campaign last year:
Matt Strong 4 starts
Josh Simm 0 starts
Michael Ostick 0 starts
Shane Grady 2 starts
Rob Draper 0 starts
Dayne Donoghue 2 starts
You can't blame the club officials if they weren't going to offer Ostick a new contract (but then realised he had another year to go). How many other players who are coming to the age of 21 are kept on if they are not getting into the 1st team on a regular basis. IMO and as I've said I've not got access to the inside facts, it looks to me like Ostick was going to be overlooked as a direct result of Steve McCormack's playing policy - do you really think the club would have wanted to get rid of him if he'd been in the team every week and playing well?
His stand out form in pre-season this year has meant he couldn't realistically be left out, but what you are saying is its too late for the club to make ammends. I just hope Michael gives the club the benefit of the doubt and that the comments you have made are just your own and not necessarily what Michael Ostick thinks.
