Didn’t realise he was a Walsall lad. Would it be too much to hope that he is a genuine Saddlers fan?
Judging by the rest of the population of Walsall, yes.
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Not a great look either with the soundbites a few years back of income split 50:50 between first team and everything below.
Generally what was produced between 2010-15 justfied the split budget, very difficult to last 4 years.
Papa Johns should be opportunity to properly blood some of the young players but seems DC prefers to put experienced line ups in that although I guess being fined if you make too many changes to your league 11 is still in place?
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It was John Ward I believe, who was in charge of it at the time.
It was decided playing friendlies was a good idea…
Said this all along, if we’re going to continue to bring in untried kids from other Clubs on Loan, we may as well shut the Academy.
As it’s either producing nothing even approaching League 2 standard OR is completely disregarded in preference for kids from “bigger clubs”.
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A few things for us to consider
We regularly recruit from the local clubs who’ve just released their U16s (Wolves, Albion, Villa, Blues, Cov) and that their signing is at the expense of players we have developed from 8yo - 16yo. With this is mind we may as well get rid of the Youth System.
How many players do we actually sell at a Profit who we “produced”. This is off the top of my head since the year 2000. Fryatt, Bennett, Grigg, Patterson, Dann, Bakayoko, Rico anyone else. This list isn’t great. I wonder how many of these joined us at 16 after being at other clubs ? I wonder what its cost us over 20 years to produce a list of less than 10 players who weve been able to sell
What players of any note have made significant contributions since 2000 - Roper, Keates, Mark Wright, Matt Gadsby, Gary Birch, Mark Bradley, Taundry, Ishmel, Grigg, Alex Nicholls, Patterson, Dann, Kieran Morris, Bates, Kinsella, Bakayoko, Preston, Rico, L Roberts, K Roberts, Bowerman. Feel free to throw in any other names but it isn’t a great list. Is it worth all the investment - possibly not.
The alternative option is brining in players like Kris Taylor, Gerrard, Fox, Deeney, Mantom, Sawyers, Downing who had turned 18, possibly older but we gave them their first opportunities and did well.
Edit i can’t remember when Ricketts and Platt left us was it pre or post 2000 ? But they were both homegrown and sold.
Hopefully today is good news for Perry and the other yoof. Whoever we appoint as Manager has to be told a huge part of his job is to develop our own young players. If he doesn’t want to do that, end the interview and send him home.
I don’t see it as an alternative though. We should be doing both. Develop our own youngsters, but also be willing to give opportunities to those released by bigger Clubs.
First Saddlers team I watched had Bennett, Atthey, Harrison, Morris, all ours, plus Brian Taylor we’d picked up as a free from Coventry. A few years later we bought in Buckley, Dennehy, Pollock and Serella, all young players from Forest, but also developed Birch, Caswell and Shelton ourselves.
We need to do both, but mostly we need to do a lot better.
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Get your boots clean kid, you might actually get a game now.
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Have been trying to find out some objective measurement of our youth setup and come across these to:
Can’t find the comparable report for the latest 2 seasons but this is along same lines for last year:
On all 3 we’re well down the list compared to the big boys in the EPL and Championship, but don’t seem to be doing too badly compared to our direct competitors in L1 & L2. So in the light of these rather than uninformed opinion, should we continue with the academy or not?
Some further food for thought - reading up on the subject it seems that the 2 main approaches clubs can take is either a) take on as many promising youngsters as possible to increase the odds of finding a gem amongst the dross, or b) concentrate on a small pool of the more promising candidates and invest more in them individually to try and help them make the grade whilst also being quicker to weed them out if they appear not to be.
If you go for quality over quantity (as most “smaller” clubs do) then entering competitive leagues can be problematic as you have to maintain a level of squad to make it viable that you can fulfil all the fixtures (high fliers will be bumped up to the first team squad for more experience, those at the lower end might be cut early and replaced by new hopefuls - meaning that the squad of players will be fluid and the team put out to compete in a continual state of flux).
And then of course if you’re in a competition with the richer more glamourous clubs, who can have larger intakes and attract the cream of the crop to start with, then they are at a natural advantage over clubs like ourselves in terms of the quality and depth of the teams they can put out - which can be good for the kids as they’re continually being pitted against better players and need to develop more quickly in order to be able to compete, but also bad if they’re getting beat every match and lose confidence. And of course if anyone sticks out too much as being a star of the future it alerts the bigger clubs who might come knocking for their signature before they make our first team and thus are still fairly cheap
Hence some smaller clubs prefer to play less meaningful competitions amongst themselves (which can lower the number, and quality, of teams that our kids get to face - which might not be that much of a help in their development) or only bother with selected “friendlies” against (potentially) anyone.
So, from that point of view, us entering the kids a team in a league/cup or just playing friendlies is less of issue than is being made of it.
The question then becomes - do we continue with a small squad of kids that we spend more time, money and resources on individually (but, being a smaller number to start with, will likely only produce a small number of “keepers”), or increase the intake to hopefully also increase the chances of unearthing a gem (but which, although cheaper per individual, would cost more overall)?
Or, as has been suggested, do away with it completely and rely on finding rough diamonds amongst the hopefuls discarded by other clubs (like Mantom, Sawyers, Bradshaw, etc)?
Our Academy team lost 7-0 to Fleetwood today…
You can put a “spin” on that by saying it was a weakened Team with a number of players on 1st team duty tonight😀
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Firstly it’s all irrelevant if the Manager (whoever it is) won’t “throw them in”. So there needs to be an understanding on Appointment, that this is the ethos of the Club and must be reflected in building the squad.
With regards the approach, for me it’s a numbers game at that age and it needs to be more cutthroat. Hand out more 1 year Pro Contracts - but then move these Players on quickly. What tends to happen in, Players are here for years making no impact.
There is a human element to dealing with youngsters career aspirations but I feel we let emotion take priority over reality.
Wasn’t he in charge of the youth, so he must have a large amount of knowledge about them.
Would much rather have perry than bates in midfield
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It’s not even close either. He hasn’t done a lot to get passed Bates but then … he hasn’t needed too.
Good touch, nice passer of a ball, seems to get up the pitch.
I like that he’s reasonably tall too a big thing in this division. Can’t remember the last time we produced a player that wasn’t a midget. Kinsella CCM Bates Candlin none really had presence.
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Can remember Bates when he first started getting game time under Keates . Coming on and pushing us forward and looked confident and a prospect.
Under Duttons coaching and Clarke’s management has sadly gone backwards. Definitely a player there as with some other players needs a decent manager for his progress.
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Simply should’ve played far more this season.
The one plus from the last two months.
Too early to write off Bates aswell. He’s had a difficult second season but let’s see what he’s like under the next manager.
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Great strike from Perry yesterday…
Samuel Perry joined FC Leamington until the end of the season, understand they’ve paid a small fee for his services and will be picking up 80% of his wages. Good luck Samuel.
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