Aaron Stokes has been speaking on the Everything is Black and White podcast about how he wishes to see Kelland Watts remain at Newcastle United.
Last week, the Magpies played their first pre-season friendly of the season in a behind-closed-doors game against National League outfit Gateshead, which they won comfortably 5-1 and saw a whole host of players get a runout.
However, only one Newcastle player was afforded the full 90 minutes and that was 22-year-old Watts, who enjoyed a great season out on loan with Wigan Athletic last season, featuring 35 times on their way to lifting the League One title.
Following the arrival of Sven Botman, Watts’ future – at least in the short term – is now up in the air, but Stokes wants to see him stick around the first-team squad this season.
He said: “It’s a tricky one, because I think for me, I would like to see him kept, as we touched on. If you look at the centre backs that they’re going to keep – let’s assume that Clark and Fernandez are going to go – you’ve got Botman, Burn, Schar, Lascelles and then Watts is going to potentially battle Lascelles for that fourth/fifth place at centre-back.
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“On the other hand, he is very, very young. We know that Dan Ashworth coming in, his track record of Brighton was these young players need loan time, they need minutes; it’s no good just having them stagnating at such a crucial age in their career.
“So my head says send him out on loan, my heart says let’s keep him in, because like you say, everybody that talks about him has very, very rave reviews. So it’ll be nice to see what he does, but I would like to see him given a proper chance.”
TIF Thoughts on Watts’ future…
Watts has recently spoken to NUFC TV about how good it was to get a full runout alongside players such as Lascelles and Burn during the latest friendly, and after two consecutive promotions while out on loan, he may feel the time is right to start pushing those senior centre-backs.
Heading into this new season, Eddie Howe already has a huge dilemma on his hands as to which centre-back pairing he goes with following the arrival of big-money signing Botman and after Fabian Schar and Dan Burn performed admirably last campaign.
So if Watts is going to be restricted to just the odd cup appearance and some minutes off the bench late in games, Dan Ashworth and Howe may well see fit that he heads out on loan to perhaps a Championship club and get another season of games under his belt.