Glad the move is successful for John, wish him well.
http://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/jan/09/john-lundstram-oxford-united-swansea-fa-cup-everton
In the summer of 2013 John Lundstram started England’s
opening match at the Under-20 World Cup alongside Ross Barkley, Harry Kane and Eric Dier, with John Stones on the bench. Last Sunday, while the other four players contested the Premier League match between
Everton and Tottenham Hotspur, Lundstram was pursuing his football education at Oxford United, having turned down a new contract at Everton in the summer. “It was the best decision I ever made,” says the 21-year-old midfielder who aims to show on Sunday, when Oxford host Swansea City in the third round of the FA Cup, that he has what it takes to graduate back to the elite.
Lundstram was nominated for the
League Two player of the month award for December and feels that his career is finally taking flight. It is doing so partially because he has learned to exert more control over the direction he takes.
In 2013 he went to the World Cup on the back of impressive performances as a loanee at Doncaster Rovers, whom he
helped to the League One title, and with high hopes of breaking into the Everton first team. But that was also the summer in which Roberto Martínez arrived at Goodison Park to replace David Moyes, under whom Lundstram had seemed poised to make a breakthrough.
“When David Moyes was at Everton I was in the squad and with the first team and doing really well but as soon as he left it just wasn’t the same for me,” says Lundstram without bitterness. “It’s a game of opinions and I wasn’t involved in the first team as much as I’d have liked under Martínez. I was meant to go on a pre-season tour with the first team when I came back from Doncaster and then, a couple of days before that, I got taken off the squad list to go and I was never told why. That knocked my confidence a bit and little things like that set me back a bit. Then I had to go on loan to Yeovil.”
Yeovil were bottom of the Championship and their style did not suit a player whose main quality is his expansive passing. “It wasn’t the right club because we never had the ball,” he says, raising an issue that affects many young players’ development: in three years as a professional at Everton he went to five different clubs on loan and wishes he had been more assertive about his moves. “If I had my time again, I’d have more say in where I went and would say ‘no’ to some things. But I was just trying to please the manager and saying ‘yes, yes, yes’ all the time.”
When his contract expired at Goodison last summer Everton offered him a six-month deal but this time he did say no. “I didn’t feel it was worth wasting any more time, so I just wanted to get out there and start playing first-team football regularly – and not on loan for once. It definitely makes a difference being permanent. You just feel much more part of things.”
