League One Sunderland missed out on Macauley Bonne when the Leyton Orient hero joined Championship newcomers Charlton Athletic instead.
Jamie Vardy and Andre Gray made the step up from non-league to the Championship look easy but not everyone can deal so well with a massive increase in quality and expectation.
See Macauley Bonne, for example. He plundered 23 goals, 24 in all competitions, to fire Leyton Orient back into the Football League last season and Charlton Athletic looked to have pulled off a real coup when they succeeded in luring the Zimbabwe international to The Valley in June.
But unlike Vardy and Gray, who made an immediate impact at Leicester and Brentford, Bonne is taking a little more time to get used to life at a far higher level.
The 23-year-old has played just six minutes of Championship football so far, coming off the bench for a brief cameo in August’s 2-2 draw with Barnsley.
Charlton boss Lee Bowyer is far from worried about his £200,000 signing, telling London News Online that Bonne is ‘improving all the time’. But there is a nagging feeling that perhaps the Championship was too much too soon for a striker who has failed to get on the pitch in five of the Addicks’ six league games so far.
Sunderland were interested before Charlton got their man, according to talkSPORT. And while a move to the Stadium of Light would have come with it’s own pressures, given The Black Cats’ desperation to escape League One at the earliest opportunity, perhaps Bonne might have found goals and game-time easier to come by in the third tier rather than the second.
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