During the past week the first member of the expendable eight left the club. Now that Jordan Clarke has returned to the first-team fold it now means that we have six expendables left. Cody McDonald leaves Coventry with a slightly disappointing goal-scoring record of 7 in 43. Yet despite this it still feels a mystery as to why he never seemed to be fully able to produce his best at the club despite his previous record and given our relegation to League One. The main sentiment that Cody’s departure leaves me with is one of disappointment that he was never able to become an important player for us and also a feeling that we may have given a rival League One side a potentially important player.
His first season at the club was difficult clearly a difficult one for him. Not only were we to be relegated that year but he spent a lot of it injured and was also signed on the final day of the transfer window so wasn’t allowed time to bed into the squad. His strike record of 4 in 23 wasn’t bad considering the mitigating circumstances. Why he was unable to find his anything resembling his form of 2010-11 with Gillingham during the past season is something of a mystery to me purely looking at the numbers. However from watching him play it was clear that he was sort of out of step with the team, once Thorn left we longer had a manager who preferred a front two, his lack of potency in front of goal, especially when compared to Leon Clarke or David McGoldrick meant that he went from our great hope of last summer to someone struggling to even make the bench. At times there seemed to be questions of his fitness so when Mark Robins sent him off on loan back to Gillingham it was no real surprise. Once back at Gillingham though he scored 4 goals in 7 games prompting a recall where once again he underwhelmed.
Although I can understand why Cody was allowed to leave I wonder why we allowed him to go for free. Perhaps his wages may have been a stumbling block but given that we’ve let him go to a club where he’s been successful before and appeared to want him it seems strange that we weren’t able to get anything by the way of transfer fee. There’s also the feeling that this move will almost undoubtedly bite us in the backside, either when he scores the winner against us or when he makes those higher echelons of the top scorers table which I still sense that he is capable of doing in this league.
Sideways Sammy 