A good experience – George Lloyd reflects on Port Vale loan move
Former Port Vale loanee George Lloyd has been talking about his spell at Vale Park and says he was “learning a lot off the pitch but on the pitch as well.”
It was a good experience, a good learning curve. I came away not just learning a lot off the pitch but on the pitch as well…
The striker made eleven appearances for the club, scoring two goals after joining in the summer. However, Lloyd’s spell was cut short after he picked up a serious injury which he is now recovering from. He explained to the official Cheltenham Town website: “I’ve been running for a few days. It’s a good marker for me to be back out there. I was getting a bit sick of the bike but it is moving along swiftly now. The injury was a pubis stress response Osteitis pubis, so the stress response is why I had a lot of time out when the bone basically needed time to heal. I had a lot of fluid in and around it and that needed to be gone.”
Talking about his spell at Vale Park, Lloyd said: “The gaffer rang me on a Sunday and said they’d come in for me and he didn’t think it was a bad thing for me to get some more game time in League Two. It probably helped that I didn’t have any time to think about moving there because it happened on the Sunday and then I was off there on the Monday. I loved moving away from home, cooking my own food, being able to crack on, and even stuff like sitting at the table and doing university work because elsewhere someone can be in the front room and be a bit loud so it was really nice going away. It was a good experience, a good learning curve. I came away not just learning a lot off the pitch but on the pitch as well.
“Port Vale is a big club and they had a lot of players there. I spoke to Darrell Clarke and he said he’d watched my clips and he liked me as a player and wanted to bring me in. They’ve got some big names there all over the pitch – Aaron Martin who has had a good career, Lucas Covolan in goal who nearly went up last year with Torquay, James Wilson and Jamie Proctor are strikers and two very big names in the League so it was hard work.
“The intensity in training was good and Darrell Clarke can change at a minutes notice so you’ve always got to be prepared – he’s changed teams before and you can suddenly be starting. I didn’t play for the first few but then I started getting off the bench doing quite well. I got a start and then a few weeks later I was injured.
“We had six strikers and when I got injured four others were also injured so it was luck of the draw that as soon as everyone else was out I was out as well.”