Injury table and expected return....

[Royal Lady]

"Pearcey would have come back in regardless" WHY?????

[melonhead]

....is it cos he's our only fit CD for the bench?

[Ian Royal]

....is it cos even without Ferdinand's latest injury he's our only fully fit CD for the bench?

[Pepe the Horseman]

Jem starting for the U21s today.

[melonhead]

be good to get him back.
love that little ratter

[Rollerbob]

Jem starting for the U21s today.

Got smashed 5-0.

I thought our U21's were decent!

[Pepe the Horseman]

Lol. Karacan't.

[Rollerbob]

Lol. Karacan't.

[Ian Royal]

Jem starting for the U21s today.

Got smashed 5-0.

I thought our U21's were decent!

Lincoln, Long (Sweeney 46), Keown, Cooper, Griffin, Stacey, Karacan (Cardwell 46), Kelly (Edwards 63), Kuhl, Fosu, Tanner.

Quite a strong line up too. Not informed enough to know what Keown is like at centreback. No real front man though.

Stacey, Kuhl and Cooper have impressed every time I've seen them. Kelly and Fosu certainly have talent.

[Nameless]

No real front man though.

.

They always play the same formation as the first team.....

But Cardwell did come on at half time.

[SCIAG]

The U21s have been disappointing this season. There are some excuses (rarely able to field anything like their strongest side), but that team should not be losing 5-0. It's a very strong side.

Keown's a perfectly passable centre back, he's played there more often than not for the past three years with the emergence of Long at right back (I'd still have Keown ahead of Long but...). It wouldn't be fair to speculate without having seen the goals, but all our older U21 defenders (the five that played today) have a major weakness of some description and on some days they're going to come up against a team that exploits it.

[marlowuk]

I thought our U21's were decent!

We do tend to 'big up' our academy sides but this year has not been their best so far.

The U21 side are 7th in a Div 2 league of 12 clubs. Including Div 1 that is 19th out of 24 teams in all. They have suffered, of course, by losing some of the best players to the 1st team.

Our U18s are 11th out of 12 in the Southern U18 league.

We have some great young players and should encourage them but maybe we have been over-estimating them?

[Ian Royal]

I don't think you win trophies and get to finals without having quality. I think last years teams had a very good blend of strong quality players, but this season the blend has been weaker and as SCIAG says the best players haven't always been available.

[mambo3]

Jem starting for the U21s today.

Got smashed 5-0.

I thought our U21's were decent!

Lincoln, Long (Sweeney 46), Keown, Cooper, Griffin, Stacey, Karacan (Cardwell 46), Kelly (Edwards 63), Kuhl, Fosu, Tanner.

Quite a strong line up too. Not informed enough to know what Keown is like at centreback. No real front man though.

Stacey, Kuhl and Cooper have impressed every time I've seen them. Kelly and Fosu certainly have talent.

Kuhl, Cooper, Stacy,Tanner have been training and playing for the 1st Team so would of expected better proformances.
The rest apart from Edwards, Karacan, have not so far benefited from this so they will have to learn through experience.

[P!ssed Off]

I thought our U21's were decent!

We do tend to 'big up' our academy sides but this year has not been their best so far.

The U21 side are 7th in a Div 2 league of 12 clubs. Including Div 1 that is 19th out of 24 teams in all. They have suffered, of course, by losing some of the best players to the 1st team.

Our U18s are 11th out of 12 in the Southern U18 league.

We have some great young players and should encourage them but maybe we have been over-estimating them?

U21s
The U21s finished 17th last season.
Despite numerous players being unavailable for a lot of their games they are currently 19th this season. Since a portion of 1st team players have returned from injury, allowing our young players to return to the U21s, results have improved and the U21 team find themselves currently on an upward trajectory.

So what they lost 1 game 5-0? That doesn't automatically make them shit. Similarly, a 5-1 win over Aston Villa last month didn't automatically make them world class.

Have the talents of the current U21 team (and by extension most of last year's U18 team) been overestimated? No, I don't think so. They are as good as most believe.

U18s
The current U18 team is a different issue. Having attended the FA Youth Cup game away at Arsenal I'm probably one of the few on here that has seen the U18s play this season (I believe that has been the only game open to the public). As a collective they didn't look anywhere near as good as last year's team.

Ultimately that doesn't bother me much. There's only so many players you can have in an U21 squad, so what point is there in having back to back quality U18 teams?

Has the current U18 team been overestimated? No, I don't think so, I don't recall anyone claiming them to be better than they are.

[Nameless]

And realistically no club ever has a continuous coneyor belt of talent, some years simply won't produce anyone exceptional. That doesn't mean the whole process is wrong, it's just reality. Whilst the current u18 may not be a vintage crop last year I believe our u14 (or was it u15) beat lots of top sides to win the Nike Cup . We''re still getting used to what it means to have atop academy, and I think we do probably need to accept it doesn't mean we get a dozen first team players from every intake. If we get a couple per year that will be very good, and considering for years we produced no first team regulars ourselves it is a huge leap forward....

[Hoop Blah]

Of course we over-hype the quality of our youngsters, it's part of the whole process. We, like every club I'm sure, have done it for years.

We do still have a good record of producing decent league footballers though and I do think we've a couple of gems coming through from the current crop of young pro's.

I'm not too bothered about the results of the U21s or the U18s as it's more about ensuring that the individuals within those teams are progressing well. Obviously a winning side is a bonus and perhaps a good indicator that there's some quality there but really we're probably on the reverse of where we've been at times in the past with successful youth and reserve teams where we used to play relatively strong sides for those levels but not quite so much recently.

[tidus_mi2]

Also you can only get an idea of what players will succeed/fail, some come as a massive surprise, some previously high hopes just sort of fade away, remember when Ugwu was going to force his way into the first team? Did anyone really think Edwards would make the first team at all, let alone this season? (Injuries...yeah).

If I look back, I'd not really heard much of Gylfi until he broke into our team, out of the current U21s we all have our idea of who is going to do well, the likes of Kuhl, Tanner, Cooper, Stacey, Long, Tshibola and Sweeney we've also got players like Cardwell, Dickie and Novakovich behind them still in development.

I'd agree we have a promising structure in place that hopefully the Thai's will build upon but our recent history isn't too shabby, producing Prem/Championship quality in: Karacan, McCarthy, Sigurdsson, Pearce, Hector, Obita, HRK, Henry, Church and Taylor, typing out that list we can actually make a team of players who have played at Championship level or above from the academy, impressive.

McCarthy
Hector, Cooper, Pearce, Obita
Henry, Karacan, Taylor, HRK
Sigurdsson
Church

[Nameless]

Suspect we could name 2 sides !
Andersen, Kuhl, Tanner, Tishbola, Stacey, Keown, Edwards.....

[From Despair To Where?]

I suppose with achieving Cat1 status there's almost now an expectancy that we will have a conveyor belt of talent. We have been spoilt with last year's Under 18's where there's 6 or 7 players being talked of as potential 1st team regulars. That's might happen once in a generation at any club.

I think another big difference now is that 5-6 years ago, there would have been more emphasis on pushing the better youngsters out on loan at a reasonably high level because the Academy leagues weren't as competative. Gylfi, Pearce, Henry and Karacan, to name 4, all had decent spells out on loan at Championship/League 1 clubs. It's only really Hector who's had a loan spell at a comparable level at Aberdeen.