Category 1 Academy

[the other bob wilson]

I don't want to keep repeating myself on this but I think it's a wider problem. As far as I can tell we're recruiting plenty of local talent of all ages, probably in greater numbers than at any time, but it keeps turning out that they're not good enough to play at our level. The table says that if one win had been a draw this season we'd have missed out on automatic promotion, Warnock didn't have a lot of room to gamble on a couple of local lads. It's the reality of it, do you think we'd have sold over 20,000 season tickets for next season if we'd missed out on promotion but Warnock had said 'don't worry, I'm going to play Coxe, Veale and Harris next season'?

I'm not pretending there aren't problems at youth level but I'm not aware of any great local talent slipping the net and none of the players we've released have played at a higher level than us yet so it's hard to say for definite that the club is doing anything wrong. We can't expect the coaching staff to turn water into wine, maybe we should be asking why the area as a whole is producing so little genuine talent. Is enough being done by schools and local authorities to encourage kids to take up football or is rugby taking the sporty ones? I've no idea. For the catchment area we've got I'd expect more local lads to be making it here but I don't think the club is entirely to blame for that.

Within that lot you've captured something which sums up the attitude to picking young players these days - "Warnock didn't have a lot of room to gamble on a couple of local lads". Our manager said back in August that he didn't think this was the right season to be looking at youngsters, but then when would be a good time to give a teenager a debut, when we're in a relegation struggle?

Seems there is always an excuse these days as to why it not's the time to look at a youngster when there's a gap in the first eleven. To be fair to Neil Warnock, he did recognise that the opportunity was there to give a couple of young players a league debut at the back end of last season, but that's the first time I can remember it happening since Ole gave Tom James and Rhys Healey some game time in the dead rubber against Chelsea four years ago.

You are coming at it from the point of view that the youngsters cannot be good enough because they would bound to be picked if they were - is that really true though? Ten years ago, Aaron Ramsey had just played in an FA Cup Final before he was eighteen and he had been a lot nearer his sixteenth birthday than his seventeenth when making his first appearance for the senior side a year earlier.

Do you think that Ramsey would have played any first team football at that age if he was coming through now? I've got no way of proving this of course, but I'm convinced he wouldn't have - I repeat something I've said a couple of times on here in recent months, it's lazy just to say the youngsters aren't good enough full stop, the goalposts have moved in recent years in a way which has done them no favours at all.

[Loramski]

Within that lot you've captured something which sums up the attitude to picking young players these days - "Warnock didn't have a lot of room to gamble on a couple of local lads". Our manager said back in August that he didn't think this was the right season to be looking at youngsters, but then when would be a good time to give a teenager a debut, when we're in a relegation struggle?

Seems there is always an excuse these days as to why it not's the time to look at a youngster when there's a gap in the first eleven. To be fair to Neil Warnock, he did recognise that the opportunity was there to give a couple of young players a league debut at the back end of last season, but that's the first time I can remember it happening since Ole gave Tom James and Rhys Healey some game time in the dead rubber against Chelsea four years ago.

You are coming at it from the point of view that the youngsters cannot be good enough because they would bound to be picked if they were - is that really true though? Ten years ago, Aaron Ramsey had just played in an FA Cup Final before he was eighteen and he had been a lot nearer his sixteenth birthday than his seventeenth when making his first appearance for the senior side a year earlier.

Do you think that Ramsey would have played any first team football at that age if he was coming through now? I've got no way of proving this of course, but I'm convinced he wouldn't have - I repeat something I've said a couple of times on here in recent months, it's lazy just to say the youngsters aren't good enough full stop, the goalposts have moved in recent years in a way which has done them no favours at all.

I'm assuming that our youngsters were available to go out on loan this season; Meite went to Crawley, Byrne to Chorley, Duffus to Hereford and, as far as I can remember, that's it. If no one else, even at non-league level, wanted to take a chance on our DVP lads then it's hardly surprising that Warnock didn't want to gamble on them in a Championship promotion race. He didn't even trust Healey or Harris by the end, it's a bit sad but if you want to tell Warnock he stuffed up then be my guest.

I agree that the kind of football Warnock plays isn't encouraging for the youngsters we have but he gave Bostock his debut for Palace at the age of 15 and I can't think of a reason why he wouldn't give a youngster a game here if he thought they were good enough. I'm sure Tan wants to know why the money that goes into the youth system is producing so little, I'd expect that everyone from him down would love to see local lads coming through to the first team for a number of reasons. Why would the club's heart not be in that as you suggested earlier?

It'll certainly be in Warnock's interests to have a couple of under-21s pushing for the first team next season to give some options on top of our 25 man squad. I assume that's what the endless trials have been about at DVP level and they have been another indication that Warnock has little faith in the youngsters that the club are producing, in the short term at least.