Carlos Corberan sends clear message to Karlan Grant after West Brom transfer
West Brom allowed pair Karlan Grant and Taylor Gardner-Hickman to join Championship rivals Cardiff City and Bristol City in the summer transfer window.
Carlos Corberan has encouraged Karlan Grant to ensure that he continues to earn his minutes at Cardiff City after joining from West Brom on a season-long loan in the summer transfer window. Grant was Albion’s top scorer in 2021-22 with 18 goals but struggled to find the net last year and was permitted a move within the Championship.
Grant will still have two years left on his Albion contract when he returns next summer, at which time Corberan has outlined that all parties will assess the lay of the land and analyse how the forward has fared across the course of an entire campaign under Erol Bulut. At the time of writing, Grant has scored once in 17 outings but he has been playing regularly.
“It’s impossible to close doors on players who are a part of this club,” Corberan said. “They still have contracts – Grant has two years more from next summer. It’s a case of when you have these feelings, and you are watching everything you have done, you re-evaluate how everything is working. Grant is playing every single minute, and I’m pleased.
“He’s not been changed. In the last games he hasn’t been a player the coach has been using to change. This is important when they’re playing every single minute – it means the coach believes in him and because he deserves this.
“With Grant I’d say, before he went for the loan, that the way he came to pre-season I was thinking that this is a player who wanted to recover his level and we considered that the best way for him to rediscover his level was to move him from here. After, in the summer, in the right moment, we will re-evaluate the situation.”
Corberan, as he did with Cedric Kipre and Alex Mowatt last season, is keeping tabs on both players in the Championship and also the club’s talents generated through the academy, who are enjoying various experiences in the lower leagues. The Spaniard is in receipt of reports from loans manager Chris Brunt, and so is well versed in their fortunes.
Indeed, as regards to the senior loanees, they have perfect case studies in Kipre and Mowatt – both crucial figures in the Albion squad this season – who can point to how beneficial loan moves and increased game time can be, although in the case of Gardner-Hickman it’s expected that Bristol City will look to trigger the clause in the agreement which will make his move a permanent arrangement.
“We always follow everything they are doing,” Corberan explained. “We have a specific scout at the club who is following every single game. He always sends me a report of the games – not only the players playing in the Championship, but the players in League One and League Two too – we like to see if they are achieving what we can not give to them, that’s playing regularly.
“Right now, the players in the Championship, Grant and [Taylor] Gardner-Hickman, they are playing regularly and that’s very positive news for us, it’s positive for us as a club and in the moments that I can find time to dedicate to look at them in more detail, I share it with the staff because we like to see everything that they are doing.
We find moments in the year where we can find distributions of the game and we can have a look in detail at them.
For me, especially the players who have been in the Championship before – or, like Grant, in the Premier League – you cannot treat them like you would the other players, who are having the first loans of their careers.
“With the players that have the experience, part of the journey is to find the best level of them and to find a way for them to play the minutes they need to play, managing the situation they have by themselves because in some moments you cannot show any interruption in the process they are having.
“With Gardner-Hickman I was talking with him when I saw him when we played against Bristol and he couldn’t play. I was talking about him with the coach [Nigel Pearson] and now they’ve changed the coach. When we play Cardiff I will do the same with Karlan Grant. They are players I respect a lot, they are players I consider both very good players, but we accept that the best way for them and for us was to separate ways this season and re-evaluate the situation and make the best decision in the summer.
“You can only make the best decision when you look at them in detail, that’s why we were doing this work with Mowatt and Kipre during the last year. In moments of time I was able to focus on them, or with Caleb, or with Fellows. That’s why we decided to integrate them into the squad this year because we were analysing everything they were doing last year.”
