Kids today! Are they really?

[Citizen's Nephew]

Ramsey
Earnie
Collins
Gunter
Jerome
Ralls
Ledley

All of those players either came through our system or were playing regularly at a young age. All of them were either as good or better than the more established/ senior players within a very short time after making their debut.

Ralls is the odd one out to me. Not because I don't agree with you but because he's a shadow of his younger self and wouldn't have survived alongside Peter Whittingham et al playing the kind of game he plays now. It's pretty bad how a series of managers have stuffed his game.

I'd forgotten about Gunter too. Will any of our current crop be added to that list? Just to be pedantic, what do you regard as a very short time?

[Tuerto]

Ralls is the odd one out to me. Not because I don't agree with you but because he's a shadow of his younger self and wouldn't have survived alongside Peter Whittingham et al playing the kind of game he plays now. It's pretty bad how a series of managers have stuffed his game.

I'd forgotten about Gunter too. Will any of our current crop be added to that list? Just to be pedantic, what do you regard as a very short time?

10 games i would say. That's just my opinion. If a young player (especially if they're creative) aren't showing progress then they will be out and substituted with 'Experience' Defenders with us just have to be able to stop the opposition adequately enough to get themselves a career, we don't do creative defenders (homegrown) Like i said, it's just my opinion, but there is pressure on young players to show managers that they're progressing, and i would say that they are scrutinised more that established players simply because of their developmental stage. It might not be fair, but it's the way it is, and the way it has always been in my opinion. Agree about Ralls.

[the other bob wilson]

10 games i would say. That's just my opinion. If a young player (especially if they're creative) aren't showing progress then they will be out and substituted with 'Experience' Defenders with us just have to be able to stop the opposition adequately enough to get themselves a career, we don't do creative defenders (homegrown) Like i said, it's just my opinion, but there is pressure on young players to show managers that they're progressing, and i would say that they are scrutinised more that established players simply because of their developmental stage. It might not be fair, but it's the way it is, and the way it has always been in my opinion. Agree about Ralls.

I wouldn't write off any youngster completely based on just this season because playing in the current team if you're just making your way in the game is a bit of a poisoned chalice - I honestly think the seventeen year old Aaron Ramsey would have found it hard in the current side with it's residue of players who may have been effective under Warnock or Harris, but are now going over the top or are being found out by our desire to paly more football.

That's why I said that the onus is on the youngsters to come up with match changing moments of skill this season because the older players are very, very unlikely to do so - especially with Keiffer not being the player he was last year. Over the past couple of seasons, Lee Tomlin and Harry Wilson have been charged with being our sole consistent "match changer" and it's instructive to see how they often were unable to influence proceedings in the first halves of games while opponents had the fitness to close them down - this allied, to our frequent inability to supply them with the sort of ball they could do something with meant that we had to wait for the last quarter of the match before Tomlin or Wilson would start making a difference.

This season the Tomlin/Wilson equivalents for the first half of the campaign were Ryan Giles and Rubin Colwill, both of whom were twenty one or under. The former was a success, but is something of a one trick pony - that's not a criticism even if it sounds like one, his crossing is excellent and we've really missed it since he returned to Wolves, but if you can stop his crosses, then he doesn't have much else to hurt you with. As for Colwill, he has been, to use a word I heard to describe his performance for the Under 23s yesterday, patchy, but who else was going to be a better bet in the number ten type role for City this season out of the players available?

One other thing, "patchy" was a diplomatic way of describing Colwill's performance for the Under 23s yesterday, poor would be more like it for me. As I mentioned in my blog piece on the game, some of the others in the team who are close to first team selection redeemed poor first half performances somewhat as the match went on, but I'm afraid Colwill didn't and, although it's unfair to draw too many conclusions from one game, there were a few in yesterday's team that looked like their exposure to the first team had sent them backwards when you compare what they did yesterday with what they were doing in the second half of last season at under 23 level.