Tom Cannon

[Lanolin]

Actually this is why clubs in the 21st century, of which we are clearly not one of, have a network of clubs in the lower divisions and worldwide where they send young players to get minutes, it’s called a feeder club. So they can do exactly that, send young players wherever they want. Do we have any feeder clubs? This isn’t a brand new cutting edge development in football, teams like Chelsea and Man Utd have been doing this since the early 00’s. We are the most old fashioned football club in the world, we are not equipped for the modern game in any way shape or form.

Well the clubs you name have better academy prospects than us and so find it easier for them to get game time, but they also have many, many players who get to 19 without having played senior football, so i'm not really sure that adds much to the debate to be honest.

 

[Nymzee]

It’s just literally common sense. I can’t “prove” to you that it’s gonna be cold tomorrow either, but you couldn’t possibly put an argument forward that it’s not going to be. How can you possibly argue that a player playing U21s football at the age of 19 is more beneficial than playing lower league football?

I never said it's more beneficial, I just said there's no way of proving he'd be a better player now than if he'd had a loan last season. How many young lads have we sent on loans that haven't come back better? Plenty of examples.

 

[Lanolin]

It’s just literally common sense. I can’t “prove” to you that it’s gonna be cold tomorrow either, but you couldn’t genuinely put an argument forward that it’s not going to be. How can you possibly argue that a player playing U21s football at the age of 19 is more beneficial than playing lower league football?

Really easily. It's an argument that's been done to death.

 

[MikeH72]

Well the clubs you name have better academy prospects than us and so find it easier for them to get game time, but they also have many, many players who get to 19 without having played senior football, so i'm not really sure that adds much to the debate to be honest.

To be honest it’s just an easy cop out to say “well all of our young players are crap anyway so what’s the point”, I don’t buy into that, sorry. We aren’t developing them properly. We haven’t done for decades.

 

[MikeH72]

Really easily. It's an argument that's been done to death.

Go on then, please explain it because despite it being done to death, I’ve yet to see a coherent argument for it.

 

[MikeH72]

I never said it's more beneficial, I just said there's no way of proving he'd be a better player now than if he'd had a loan last season. How many young lads have we sent on loans that haven't come back better? Plenty of examples.

But also you have no way of proving that Nathan Broadhead wouldn’t have developed into a better player if he’d been loaned out to League 1 when he was 18 rather than 21. I’m not saying he 100% would, but it doesn’t make any sense to me to suggest that there’s absolutely no way he could’ve been and that it’s a perfectly natural career progression to play in the U21s until you’re 23.

 

[Lanolin]

To be honest it’s just an easy cop out to say “well all of our young players are crap anyway so what’s the point”, I don’t buy into that, sorry. We aren’t developing them properly. We haven’t done for decades.

Go on then, please explain it because despite it being done to death, I’ve yet to see a coherent argument for it.

I'm not saying they're all crap, and i'm not saying we're developing them really well. I'm saying that if you have players like Broja, Hudson-Odoi, Gallagher, Gilmour etc coming through then it's easier to find people to take them than it is to find people who want to take Harry Charsley, Morgan Feeney and Bassala Sambou. If you think that's a cop out then fair enough, and I hope life in cloud cuckoo land treats you well.

Players don't all develop at the same rate. Sometimes a player needs to be tested early and pitched in to adult football, sometimes a softly softly approach works better and they will learn more from staying in their own age group and with coaches who are more interested in their long term development than their short term performance. Putting a young lad into senior football before they're ready can do more harm than good, that's just so obvious it's difficult to believe it needs to be said. Your own argument just a couple of posts back was that every other club in the world has feeder clubs so they can place players wherever they want. So why do those clubs still have lads getting to 19 and 20 without playing senior football, if it's so obvious that it's the best way to develop? You're literally proving your own point to be wrong and asking other people to explain it to you.

 

[MikeH72]

I'm not saying they're all crap, and i'm not saying we're developing them really well. I'm saying that if you have players like Broja, Hudson-Odoi, Gallagher, Gilmour etc coming through then it's easier to find people to take them than it is to find people who want to take Harry Charsley, Morgan Feeney and Bassala Sambou. If you think that's a cop out then fair enough, and I hope life in cloud cuckoo land treats you well.

Players don't all develop at the same rate. Sometimes a player needs to be tested early and pitched in to adult football, sometimes a softly softly approach works better and they will learn more from staying in their own age group and with coaches who are more interested in their long term development than their short term performance. Putting a young lad into senior football before they're ready can do more harm than good, that's just so obvious it's difficult to believe it needs to be said. Your own argument just a couple of posts back was that every other club in the world has feeder clubs so they can place players wherever they want. So why do those clubs still have lads getting to 19 and 20 without playing senior football, if it's so obvious that it's the best way to develop? You're literally proving your own point to be wrong and asking other people to explain it to you.

Are they players of any actual potential? Because invariably the best players from those academies do not linger in the under 21s until they’re 20. Even at the likes of Villa and Wolves this doesn’t happen. Are you telling me we’ve had no one aside from maybe Gordon come through our academy in the past 10 years that could’ve potentially been as good as a Jacob Ramsey or Morgan Gibbs-White? Sure it looks great for you to pick out names like Morgan Feeney and Sambou as if they’re the high watermarks of our academy, but what about players who the club themselves have bigged up and awarded professional contracts to like Simms? What good has it possibly done him stagnating in our under 21s for so long? He was a fully developed man at 17, bulldozing everyone out of the way and scoring 40 a season, why the hell was he not testing himself in adult football at that point?

It’s hard to believe that we’ve had no players come through our academy that were ready for adult football at the age of 18 for the best part of 10 years.

 

[mightymoyes]

Aside from the obvious and well argued point of loans not always being beneficial, did anybody even want him 2 years ago? We don't get to just place these lads wherever we want, someone actually has to want to take them and play them. I think you're slightly overestimating the appeal of taking an underdeveloped 17 year old kid from an academy when you're playing competitive league football.

exactly, 2 years he wouldnt have got a sniff of mens football, hes improved dramatically in the last 6-12 months

 

[MikeH72]

exactly, 2 years he wouldnt have got a sniff of mens football, hes improved dramatically in the last 6-12 months

Better coaching may have something to do with this, or of course it could just be a completely natural coincidence that he’s rapidly improved as soon as Paul Tait came into role and Undies went out the door.

 

[Nymzee]

But also you have no way of proving that Nathan Broadhead wouldn’t have developed into a better player if he’d been loaned out to League 1 when he was 18 rather than 21. I’m not saying he 100% would, but it doesn’t make any sense to me to suggest that there’s absolutely no way he could’ve been and that it’s a perfectly natural career progression to play in the U21s until you’re 23.

I never said this.

 

[Lanolin]

Are they players of any actual potential? Because invariably the best players from those academies do not linger in the under 21s until they’re 20. Even at the likes of Villa and Wolves this doesn’t happen. Are you telling me we’ve had no one aside from maybe Gordon come through our academy in the past 10 years that could’ve potentially been as good as a Jacob Ramsey or Morgan Gibbs-White? Sure it looks great for you to pick out names like Morgan Feeney and Sambou as if they’re the high watermarks of our academy, but what about players who the club themselves have bigged up and awarded professional contracts to like Simms? What good has it possibly done him stagnating in our under 21s for so long? He was a fully developed man at 17, bulldozing everyone out of the way and scoring 40 a season, why the hell was he not testing himself in adult football at that point?

It’s hard to believe that we’ve had no players come through our academy that were ready for adult football at the age of 18 for the best part of 10 years.

You're arguing a point that i'm not making though? I have literally said to you that i'm not claiming our handling of young players is impeccable, I'm just saying that saying someone like Cannon should be sent out on loan at 17 as if it's both easy and always a good idea is daft. What you're saying might possibly be right in some cases, but definitely not in all.

I just picked names at random but obviously there are far, far more examples of the type of player i'm talking about than the type of player you are. Some of the ones I named were highly rated at the time too. Feeney got as far as playing for the first team and there were definitely people saying 'why don't we get him out on loan' about him. The fact that he's about to turn 24 playing for a team currently 88th out of the 92 probably tells us that he wasn't in high demand to be playing at a higher level than that when he was 17/18, and that's the crux of the whole thing.

In answer to your first question United have a lad called Zidane Iqbal who is very highly rated and has impressed for their first team in friendlies. He's 3 months younger than Cannon and hasn't been on loan. City weren't loaning out players like Cole Palmer, Tommy Doyle, Liam Delap or James McAtee (who were all very good at youth level) until they were 19/20, if at all. Marc Guehi who was playing in the full England team at 21 and had been touted as a future England captain since he was about 14 only played senior football for the first time 6 months after his 19th birthday. I think all of that suggests that loaning players out at 17/18 isn't necessarily seen as the best thing in all situations.

 

[billyblue80]

I'm not necessarily against the idea, but to be fair to Maupay I reckon his scoring record for us might be a bit better if he was playing teams like Colchester United under 21s rather than United, Spurs and Liverpool.

I didn't say start him I said give him minutes off the bench and the odd start, for me Maupay doesn't fit our current style of play so what are we losing giving him a chance even off the bench

 

[DavidH]

Maupay is better than Rondon. If this helps all the arguing at all.

 

[blueblue]

We lack creativity in the team , we practically have none.

Players like Maupay will look much better if the had somebody playing with them who was able to use the ball to create chances and unsettle defenders. At present we are totally predictable and the signing of Kudus was to help address this problem.
We can sign another striker but if we don't create chances then his influence will also be limited.