Okay, for future reference, when a team is losing 5-0 and your first instinct is to bring up one specific player for no logical reason, that is referred to as "Not Normal" What next, blaming Kyle Walker-Peters and only Kyle Walker-Peters for Southampton getting humped 5-0 by Leicester last night?
Not just basing it on last night though. Everyone I’ve seen him play for Chelsea, he’s been rubbish. Has great pace but that’s it. And it wasn’t me that said the club made a big mistake by letting him (even though it was his choice)
Do you see anyone else in this thread using last night's nonformance as a reason to bash Conor Gallagher?
I don’t remember Spurs selling Conor Gallagher and posters such as yourself saying it was a huge mistake on the club’s part.
I do see us being habitually linked with Conor Gallagher, yet somehow no mention whatsoever of him laying an egg in matches against pretty much every Top 8 team
We let him go for free and he was subsequently sold for more than £30m. These things happen but surely that's a biggish mistake?
What could the club have done differently? He wanted to leave to get first team football and he wasn’t ready for the PL then.
He was ready for first team football, but Poch was standing in the way of that as he only signed off loaning players he didn't rate to raise their potential value - yet players he did rate were kept in the youth team instead of playing first team football, be it for the club or out on loan There was a WindyCOYS article around the time that basically spelled out the issue, namely once a player turns 18 there is a choice to make: prepare them for a place in the first team by getting them experience on loan or even going straight into the team, keep them in the academy as they have some upside but their fundamentals are still a little off, or accept they aren't going to cut it so either let them go now or keep them around for a year or two to fill out places in the U21s And it's the first part where Poch's approach went disastrously wrong, as the players he did rate - Edwards, Madueke, Shashoua, Georgiou, Sterling, Eyoma, Tanganga et al - remained in the U21s when their development needed first team minutes, and this is why several players (Madueke most obviously) chose to take their chances elsewhere rather than stay, and also why there was a borderline mutiny of agents which is why we loaned a bunch of academy players out in 2018-19 when the reality was they needed to be loaned a season or even two seasons earlier
Disagree. I don’t blame the player for leaving or the club for not bowing down to his demands. Hindsight has proved them right anyway as he’s done nothing in the PL all these years later. But some fans still insist they dropped the ball and pretend the club lost a superstar
He's done alright, all things considered. He's like a raw, unfinished Robben. Good on the ball, very tidy dribbler and shoots decently, but very predictable and one dimensional. Doesn't do enough defensively and thinks he's better than he is. The problem for me is what he represents, rather than what happened with him specifically. We've not really brought anyone into our first team from the academy since Kane, really. It becomes a death spiral, as the kids know this and are persuaded to leave more easily.
I think if another team profits to the sum of circa £30m for a player that came through your academy, there’s probably something there saying we should’ve done better. Madueke hasn’t hit the ground running at Chelsea but he still joined them for a large fee, a fee that had we been better with youth development, we could’ve got (not necessarily selling to Chelsea but you get the gist) or alternatively utilised in some capacity in the first team. As PNP has somewhat touched on though, it represents a bigger picture of highlighting what a graveyard we’ve become for youth. Winks is the last player who actually established himself in the XI for a significant period and I use the term “established” very, very lightly there as Winks outstayed his tenure here by about three years. There’s a fair case to say that right now though the club has its best crop of young players since the Kane/ Mason/ Townsend/ Bentaleb group that helped Poch massively in his first season. One of the constants I’ve bemoaned Ange for this season is his neglect of said youth, just like his predecessors did. If we’re not careful, then Donley and co may seek a similar exit that Madueke ended up taking and in 3-5 years time we could be in yet another situation of seeing another club make a large windfall that we could’ve benefitted from.
Is that because the club are refusing to use youngsters though or is it because the managers the clubs has had in recent years don’t fancy any of the prospects and/or they’re not good enough to break through yet.
Probably a bit of both, plus our failure to exploit the loan market effectively. Croydon's comments on Pochettino are pretty accurate, in my opinion. We then followed him up with two managers that build around experience and reliability. No disrespect to Espirito-Santo, who didn't have time to do anything with youth players. Mourinho and Conte are two of the most short-term coaches in the game, for me. Spend lots of money on established stars, get the job done and get out. We were not the right club for either of them and it didn't work out. I think various deaths unsettled Conte too, after a fairly impressive first season. Not a lot that you can do about that.
Players wanting to play is hardly an unreasonable demand And hindsight hasn't proved him right, what with Madueke literally playing in the Premier League and scoring four goals in his debut season - which is four more league goals than Clinton N'Jie and Georges-Kevin Nkoudou between them during their Spurs careers But some posters will insist on thinking it's a bright idea to single out one player when a team is getting humped 5-0 as an excuse to needle somebody in spite this behaviour being described as "Not Normal"
I think what really stands out is that, during Poch's tenure, there was evidence of players whose value was increased by them getting playing time out on loan - most obviously Alex Pritchard fetching an £8m fee after a series of loans in the Championship and League One, while we eventually got £6m for Cameron Carter Vickers - so it's not unreasonable to believe that we would have got decent fees for a few of the youngster's during Poch's tenure, be it six figure fees for the likes of Anthony Georgiou or Kazaiah Sterling to fees in the £5-10m bracket for Edwards or Josh Onomah, and it's likely that very few of those would have crashed and burned like Reo Griffiths did after joining Lyon in search of regular football and practically vanishing off the face of the earth In terms of Ange's approach, he gets a partial pass this season as the longterm plan is to get his tactics ingrained in all players from the first team down to the U18s which will take a degree of time to see if they are becoming second nature in much the same way Fraudiola and Norbert have with their clubs' respective academies so that the main requirement for players stepping up is to put on muscle in the gym as the tactics are in their muscle memory already That being said, outside of a few late sub appearances from Donley and Scarlett, there have been missed opportunities to give youngsters some playing time: while I get not throwing Dorrington & Phillips into the deep end when Romero was suspended and Mickey Van injured we certainly should have considered giving them debuts once Romero was back in the team even if it was as a late sub for Davies, Yago Santiago has made the bench once or twice and got no further (thought that was when we laid an egg against Brighton), and it does have to be said the matches with Burnley and Sheffield United in our run-in are both chances for someone like Santiago, Lankshere or Soonsup-Bell to come off the bench but at the moment you do have to wonder if they'll even be on the bench To give Nuno some credit, he did seem willing to give youngsters a chance with Jack Clarke, J'Neil Bennett, Nile John, Maksim Paskotsi, Dane Scarlett and Dilan Markanday all featuring in the Conference League (while several others were named in matchday squads), while Skipp and Tanganga were in his first team plans - though given he had a very firm A Squad and B Squad and the majority of youngsters were basically there to make up the numbers of the B Squad rather than actually play in them
