With Aston Villa bringing in Wolverhampton Wanderers defender Kortney Hause in recent days, head coach Dean Smith has now given his full thoughts on the capture of the young talent.
The 23-year-old came through Wycombe Wanderers’ youth setup and earned the move to the Molineux back in January 2014, notching up over 70 appearances to his name in the Wolves first team and at least from what I can tell, his progress was only stunted when they went Portuguese.
With Villa clearly in need of defensive cover, Hause should certainly get decent game time in the second half of the year and with some stories claiming he failed a medical and we wanted a permanent deal originally, Smith certainly gave no indications of that as he spoke to the Official Site this week.
With the player now in training for us, Smith praised his ‘attitude, application and character’ stating that he was already looking a ‘bright’ capture for us.
“Kortney is a good young prospect with bags of potential. He has quality. You’re not at a club like Wolves, who are now Premier League, without having quality. I saw him break through as a youngster at West Ham so I’ve known about him for a long time. He also gives balance being a left footer. But he has great attitude, application and character. You do a background check on all players you want to bring in – the recruitment side is a big part of it. We have spoken to a lot of people who have worked with him and he has a great aptitude for learning and that tells me he can fulfil his potential. I am fully aware of the player we’re bringing in and, more importantly, the character we’re bringing in. He will add to the squad and certainly bring us balance.”
In the full nine-minute interview above, Smith also spoke about the loan to buy nature of the deal, insisting it was the only way forward as Villa can’t keep on training up other clubs’ players with no long term benefit for ourselves and that will be music to the ears of fans given the number of stop-gap loans we’ve had in recent seasons.
“We’ve managed to get Kortney on loan with the option to buy. That’s very important to us, because you ideally you don’t want to be developing players for ourselves. That’s what we have the option to do with Kortney.”
We seem to finally have a plan!
