Southampton boss Nigel Adkinswants a youthful side to consolidate themselves in the Premier League next season. Following their promotion from the Championship the former Scunthorpe manager wants to fill his newly-promoted team with young talent from the club's own academy. [Taken from the BBC Live Sportsday Page] Sounds positive to me, and with the 7 sub ruling, there's more space for Reeves, Hoskins, W-P etc to be involved!
Really looking forward to seeing Shaw and Ward-Prowse. Also Jake Sinclair could be useful as we don't really have a pacey striker. Hopefully he's as good as his brother.
Sounds promising but we have to make sure we get the right mix of youth and experience. Can be very detrimental to young players careers if they are relied upon too much too soon.
We know this is the club's aim, but I suspect the BBC forgot to put in the word eventually. Nigel is on the look out for several players, for next season, who are better than we already have, and he isn't looking at Academy players when he says that. So Academy players will eventually come into the side, more and more, but I don't expect anything but the smallest introduction next season. One or two on the bench perhaps, or maybe some starts for a few in the Cups. Don't expect Barcelona Mk.II overnight.
I know Nigel hated that he could only have five on the bench because it blocked youngsters. He said that, even if they didn't play, it was part of a youngster's development to travel with team and get the feel of a match from the bench.
Hoskins, Reeves, Doble all travelled with the squad at some point. I'm sure others did as well but I know for a fact these did without being involved in the matchday squad.
Yeah, That's not quite what I meant I meant them travelling just for the experience in a league game, rather than them travelling with the aim of playing in a cup game
They are discussing whether or not to bring back the 7 sub rule for next season in the football league, they should bring it back, pretty stupid decision to get rid of it.
Think they brought it in so as not to favour bigger clubs like Southampton over teams struggling to fill the bench. Ended up with some teams, including us, dropping the spare GK. Made little sense.
I just hope they don't think we can stay up with a team of kids. I'm all for bringing the youngsters through, but it's a balancing act. We need quality signings too.
Yeah that was the logic, that the clubs with more money could fill their benches with higher quality players, giving them an advantage over the less wealthy teams. All they had to do was keep it at 7 subs but say that 2 of the subs had to of come through the clubs academy.
Adkins now talking about same thing on OS. Says target is 50 per cent home grown players in team. Also wants to get team sorted in the summer and not have to try and get players in January.
