Swap for the Wilford Lane academy site. I'm sure the residents of Lady Bay will be delighted.
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It's all about compromise.
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Forest apparently the only EPL club not to use a single player aged 21 and under, who'd come through the club from U18s, in the EPL this season.
Which is a great advert for our academy (to compare, bindippers used nine, Chelsea and Newcastle eight).
Every day I find something about the current incarnation of our club that I dislike more and more. -
That's understandable though surely, our academy was/is dealing with players we thought might be able to make the step up into the Championship, the chances of many being ready for the Premier League seems slim. It'll take our academy a few seasons to catch up with the step up in level as our intakes into the system catch up.
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Merely that they seem to be doing pretty well with a capacity around half our current one.
Maybe I lack ambition but I don't see us competing for top 10 any time soon, 50k capacity or not.
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Yeah, it would have been a disaster to have Osong playing minutes instead of key players like Origi and whatever that kid from Portugal is called.
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The only young player coming through that I've seen and looks like he might have something to offer is Aguilera, but that's because I've not seen many and he's not even an academy player.
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C'mon now. If you think we should be giving a debut to an 18 year old in key matches ahead of using a player on loan from AC Milan who has 32 caps for Belgium and scored 1 in 4 for Liverpool in the Prem and the Champions League, then I think you're never going to find enjoyment from modern top flight football.
Osong got his senior debut in the League Cup, which is the correct way to do it.
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You give them opportunities to see how they cope and respond. I would rather take a risk on giving them an occasional go than fill the squad with expensive wastrels. Put the money into a small quality squad and when there are gaps give youngsters a chance to show what they can do.
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And if they're overawed and made to look stupid by the kind of elite opponents the Premier League offers up then you hurt both the team and the player. The correct way to blood young players is in the cups and on loan in lower leagues, not high pressure Premier League games. Even if we were in mid table then you might have a bit more of an argument, but I can't think of a single game this season in which giving an Academy player his debut would have been anything other than a stupid long odds gamble.
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Fulham away?
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So every other club in the division is doing it wrong and we are getting it right?
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I saw him walking across to the Aldi on Daleside Road last week.
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The criteria is "player aged 21 and under, who'd come through the club from U18s". We don't have a player ready for debut who fits that description. Forcing a prospect like Osong into the team in order to satisfy the desires of fans who miss the 1980s would be monumentally dumb.
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Really I don't think you can say much based on a single year when the numbers for most clubs is pretty low. If he'd put Joe Gardner on for the last 5 minutes of either games he was on the bench for or Osong or McDonnell for the game they were, we'd be level with Arsenal, Brentford and Fulham and there are another 7 clubs who only had 2.
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But signing a player from Portugal's third division, for a reported 10m euros isn't?
That's my issue - we're blocking the pathway to the first team with questionable signings and then crying about it when the EPL says manage your money better.
We did have players on the fringes, but bombed them out for incredibly expensive imports - most of our U23s were got rid of, so the B team is pretty much an U20 side.
I'm not even convinced any of them train with the first team now, given Nuno's desire for a small squad and WMD-level of interest in the academy sides. At least SSC was involving them with the first team on a regular basis.
