David Puttnam
David Puttnam was a personal favourite of mine and I would be doing myself an injustice if I didn’t drop him in here. Danny loves a winger and back in the day, they were in short supply at the Bank. Puttnam was a typical ‘Danny Cowley’ winger; he loved a drop of the shoulder and burst of pace.
He was perhaps more Bruno Andrade than Harry Anderson, but Putts had a goal or two in him as well as skill and trickery. he joined in the 1989/90 season and so just makes the list, but his best football perhaps came under later managers.
That doesn’t rule him out though. Whether he’d be up to the tracking back that Danny demanded would be interesting to see, but I often felt that we didn’t see the very best of Putts because of the approach, certainly after Murph left. Allan Clarke’s football might have suited him, had it actually worked, but after that we played long and that didn’t favour a tricky winger.
Despite this, he is still a top player in my eyes, someone I looked up to as a youngster purely because he did the things I wanted to do; beat players, score goals and get people off their seats. In our current set up, where full backs support the attack and wingers are given the opportunity to drift inside, cut outside and get balls into the box, David Puttnam would have thrived. No doubt.
You must be logged in to post a comment.