MARK McGhee has expressed his disappointment that Oliver Burke has departed Germany after little over a season with RB Leipzig.
However, the Scotland assistant remains confident the 20-year-old, who has joined Wes Bromwich Albion in a £15 million move, can be an important player for his country in the future.
Burke failed to establish himself as a first team regular in the Bundesliga after moving for a Scottish record £13 million fee last year and has returned to England.
McGhee, who spent a season with Hamburg during his own career, feels the former Nottingham Forest kid needs to play regularly to fulfil his potential and is hopeful he can develop further at the Hawthorns.
“It’s really disappointing that things didn’t work out for him in Germany, but he’s moved to a fantastic league and an established club,” he said.
“We think he’s a tremendous talent, but he needs to play games and find a way of playing and find his game.
“At the moment his potential is huge. He has power and size and crossing ability and can score goals. But he has to find his place in a team and he can only do that by playing games.
“We need to be patient with him and not write him off this year. He has to learn to be part of a team.”
McGhee added: “He’s still raw even though he’s been in Germany. I hope the German way has rubbed off on him.
“When he went away with the under 20s in the summer and was outstanding. He was made captain and he played and behaved like a captain.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here