by SCIAG »
26 Aug 2024 13:07
Clyde1998 Stranded Brogue Only 5 Academy graduates have scored more goals for Reading than Kelvin E - now on 15 goals.
Long 56
HRK 30
Simon church 24
Gylfi 22
Smith 17
Honest question: Can we really count Long as an Academy graduate? Signed in the summer of '05 and was regularly on the bench by the New Year.
I think the club counts anyone who played for the U18s or a younger age group before playing for the first team as an academy graduate.
If you go through the profiles on the club website, there's a lot of players considered youth graduates who joined the club at sixteen or older. The I went through some of them to find: Michael Hector; James Henry; Julian Kelly; Gylfi Sigurdsson;
Ryan Edwards; Sean Long;
Mikkel Andersen; Niall Keown; Andrija Novakovich; Josh Barrett; Andy Rinomhota (the two in bold were 18).
Henry had been around the club for a while before agreeing to a scholarship.
With Barrett you’ve misread the reference to his U21 debut at 17. He had been with the club since at least the age of 15. Did very well for our U16s.
You could add Ben House, Axel Andresson and Darius Henderson. I think Axel was a first year (16) while House and Henderson were what we would now call second year scholars (17).
I think the unfortunate thing is that way back in the early days of the modern academy we called Henderson one of its first graduates because he was signed as an academy player, even though he hadn’t been at the club long when he signed professional terms.
The difference with Long is that he was 18 when we signed him, and we signed him on professional terms from the off. But he did sneak into some U18 lineups iirc - these days he wouldn’t be eligible because he’d had his birthday in January.