Conor Masterson

What?? Leaving a club in the bottom half of league 1 back a club that is in the top 5 of the championship. If anything it's a good move 

It's disappointing to see his career on the slide as, of all our young centre backs, he was arguably the one that was most highly rated leaving Ireland. I think Liverpool paid quite a large fee for him - the very first post on this thread suggests a million but that might have been overstating it? But it hasn't worked out. Not a huge problem from an Ireland point of view as we have so many other centre backs, but disappointing for the player obviously.

Possibly he stayed at Liverpool too long and didn't play enough football at a younger age. Dara O'Shea was out learning the game in the non leagues and League 2 while Masterson was playing Under 23s at Liverpool. Of course it's also possible that he was overrated to begin with and just wasn't as good as was thought.

I'd like to see him come back to Ireland now and play League of Ireland this year. I'm sure he'd have plenty of interest. We saw with the Under 21s there is talent there, he might be a standout defender in the League of Ireland and maybe go again from there.

Nolan is still at Getafe AFAIK. He had a bad cruciate injury shortly after arriving.

We are absolutely blessed at centre back for the foreseeable future so I think we can safely write these 2 off in terms of international football.

So someone like Masterson is competent in the Liverpool way of being a centre back, good on the ball etc. but not good enough to break through at Liverpool. So he heads off down the leagues and it turns out that it's a completely different skill set that's needed to be a centre back at places like QPR and he doesn't have the right skills, but by then it's too late to fix the problem.

I think it was someone like Dan Crowley (or possibly another Irish eligible youth player) who said something similar about Arsenal. They made him a great technical player but gave him the wrong skills for the lower level he was more likely to be playing at during his career. Maybe Masterson would have been better served in the long run going to somewhere like West Brom rather than Liverpool, we'll never know I suppose.