Kids today! Are they really?

[Tuerto]

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.

Interesting what you say about Colwill and others, concerning their exposure to first team football. What you say is completely plausible in my opinion, it's an interesting theory. It could also mean that they may feel after what they have achieved in the first team, that going back down to U23 is a sort of demotion in real terms.

I do wonder if the expectation has got to Colwill a bit, and that he has stagnated somewhat.

[the other bob wilson]

Interesting what you say about Colwill and others, concerning their exposure to first team football. What you say is completely plausible in my opinion, it's an interesting theory. It could also mean that they may feel after what they have achieved in the first team, that going back down to U23 is a sort of demotion in real terms.

I do wonder if the expectation has got to Colwill a bit, and that he has stagnated somewhat.

I didn’t think he’d dropped off in form in recent weeks, he wasn’t turning it on in every game, but he hadn’t been doing that earlier in the season either - for me, he was just showing that bit of inconsistency you’d see from a young player coming into the first team in sides that aren’t fighting a relegation battle.

I think you make a fair point about a sense of anti climax about finding themselves back playing at Leckwith in front of one man and his dog. There’s been stacks of games down the years where a City reserve team with plenty of first teamers in it for one reason or another has been pretty awful and it’s accepted that this is because, for example, the last thing they want is an injury which will rule them out for weeks or months, so why shouldn’t it be the same for players such as Colwill, Evans, Bowen and Bagan?