Edmondson was so close to joining Cobblers in the summer

For Keith Curle, confirmation of Ryan Edmondson's loan move to the Cobblers from Leeds United on Thursday afternoon came five months too late.

The 19-year-old was high on Curle's summer wishlist and at one point Town were in advanced discussions with Leeds over bringing him to the PTS for a season-long loan.

But Curle is not the only manager to think highly of Edmondson and with several clubs registering an interest, it was Aberdeen who won the battle for his services.

The move north of the border didn't work out, however, and when the England U19 international returned to Leeds earlier this month, Curle was not about to lose out for a second time.

"I'm very happy to get Ryan in and this is what we mean when we talk about recruitment being an ongoing progress because we showed a lot of interest in Ryan before he went to Aberdeen and I think that helped us out," explained Curle.

"He's a player we spotted a while ago and he was well aware of how we saw him fitting into our plans and what we thought of him as a player and as an individual.

"As soon as we found out he was coming back from Aberdeen, we made contact with him and his representatives and because of the previous interest, it was a very short conversation. We were very interested and when I spoke to the player again, he still that hunger about him."

Due to circumstances out of his control, Edmondson's move to Aberdeen didn't go as planned.

"He went to Aberdeen and it didn't work out game-time wise," Curle added. "He went there as a replacement for Sam Cosgrove who had a move lined up but he then got injured and that fell through which meant Ryan's game-time was limited and he didn't get the exposure he thought he would get.

"But he's coming to us now and he's hungry and he has a desire. He wants to be playing minutes and he wants to be scoring goals and that was evident from the conversations I had with him."

Edmondson himself said: "My agent has been in contact with the club for a couple of seasons now and I know Northampton were after me at the start of the season just before I went to Aberdeen.

"We went with the Aberdeen option at the time but that didn't work out really so we came back down and looked our options again and Northampton were still knocking on the door and they were very interested."