Second Season Syndrome: The Verdict
- Harry Anders
- 6 hours ago
- 4 min read
In July, UpThePoshcast took a look at four players we felt could kick on in their second season at the club.
Now, as we head towards the end of the campaign, it’s time for our verdict on Chris Conn-Clarke, Abraham Odoh, Oscar Wallin, and Cian Hayes… and it does not make for pretty reading.
Chris Conn-Clarke
The bar was low coming into the season, with very little needed to demonstrate improvement, and yet still he regressed.
He scored a decent goal against Leicester in a pre-season friendly, but made the bench only once for Posh this term, against Luton at home where he did not come onto the pitch, before being shipped out on loan to Carlisle United in the National League.
He started reasonably well there, getting eight goal contributions in his first seven games, but has three assists in five months since.
It is possible that the 24 year old will turn the corner, dedicate himself to a physical programme that allows him to compete at a League One level consistently, and apply himself well under Luke Williams in preseason.
The odds of that seem vanishingly small at this point. He is a strong contender for a move back to the National League in the summer.
Abraham Odoh
It is easy to forget Odoh had 21 goal contributions in his first season at Posh. So easy, in fact, that he appears to have forgotten how to do anything effective on the football field.
The moments last season like his excellent assist at Exeter, or his spectacular performance at Crawley Town, have not been repeated.
It was not long into this season that fans began to turn on the Fergie-stalwart.
A month into Luke Williams’ tenure, the new management team became fed up with his lack of production as well. He has now not made it onto the pitch in months, and appears to be at best fifth in the winger pecking order.
Odoh is an unusual winger in that his top speed is no higher than a typical centre back. He has a well-above-average ability to laser balls into the far corner when cutting in from the wing, a skill he repeated as recently as the final day of last season at Rotherham.
But too often, his lack of burst allows him to be bottled up before any meaningful threat can be built. He is an effective tracker of runs when defending, although lacks meaningful tackling ability. These skills were not ones that suited Posh this season.
There is, hopefully, a long EFL career ahead for ‘Ibi’. His reportedly positive attitude in training will no doubt lead to a few League Two clubs approaching Posh in the summer for his services. With a fresh start, he could kick on. But the odds of that happening at Posh appear lower than even Chris Conn-Clarke’s…
Oscar Wallin
…But not as low as Oscar Wallin, who has retired from football altogether! Not long into the season, he packed his bags and headed back home to restart his education.
The first part of an abject and failed Swedish experiment, Oscar Wallin was a decent enough athlete with little in the way of defending quality.
After being a key flaw at the back last season, he remained a flaw going into this one and showed no improvement in early games, such as Wigan away.
Now out of football entirely, let’s hope Wallin can see through his studies with more application than he was able to see through almost any 90 minutes with Posh.
Cian Hayes
What to say about Cian Hayes? Unlike the other three, this has not been a terrible season for him - far from it. As a backup winger in a transitioning Posh side, he could arguably be considered a success.
Games such as Plymouth away, where he dutifully filled in as left wing back for the closing stages of the game (and did very well) show he can cause problems to team who are on the attack and there to be exploited.
And we should not discount the moments where he has risen to the occasion in games that we looked like we were going to lose. He salvaged Posh’s first point of the season against Bradford (and if he’d been slightly better positioned, could have even bagged a winner), and showed flashes away at AFC Wimbledon more recently, culminating in an assist for Jimmy-Jay Morgan.
Sadly, any hope that he would progress like Ephron Mason-Clark or Kwame Poku did have almost certainly been dashed by this point. He remains deeply inconsistent, and unable to make adjustments in games to his approach to find ways around stubborn defences.
If he were even a 5% better dribbler, it would mask about 80% of his deficiencies, which have become progressively more exposed as the season has gone on.
He still cannot pass consistently, cannot cross consistently, and cannot press consistently. On all these counts, he has shown he can do them sometimes against some teams. But his standout quality, his dribbling, needs to go up another level next season if he is to have a decent chance at remaining a rotational member of a squad that is likely to invest heavily in wingers this summer.
Conclusion
Three misses and no hits… it really was ‘second season syndrome’ for these players after all.
Let’s hope we do not see this pattern repeated with Dave Okagbue, Harry Leonard, Ben Woods, Kyrell Lisbie, Brandon Khela and Matty Garbett (if they are here!) next season.
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