Too many midfielders

Wrong again, Aaron Cresswell was a Paul Jewell signing. Daryl Murphy played poorly under Keane, and Hourihane was a squad player at best for us. He went on to have a good Championship career, although not for us and not under Roy Keane, who didn’t play him once. I could list the amount of overpriced rubbish he brought into the club, but I think most of us are aware of them.

Jewell took us to the bottom and was rightly sacked, but Keane was not a massive improvement and McCarthy was easily a better manager for us than him. The notion that relegation and seven years of Keane would be preferable to a play off season and Championship stability is quite frankly laughable.

So it’s a coincidence that as soon as Klug rejoined us and had a few years with us, the academy has randomly started to bear fruit again? Utter tosh.

 

Classic pie on face moment that.

What fruit has the academy borne?

 

I get pelters on this forum for sticking up for Mick who DID get us into the play offs on probably 25% the ££££ Keane did.

How in gods name are you still going on about what Keane could have done?

Keane's even had the good grace to admit himself he did a crap job with us.

Jesus christ the guy was a bloody disaster for us - I was excited when we first hired him, two games, wanted him to get it right but that quickly went out the window. Just an absolute disaster frankly.

 

I've never bought this version of events.

The only time in my life I have not been excited to go and watch Town was the 5 years McCarthy was in charge. In fact I don't think I bothered to travel to Suffolk to watch a game in all that time.

 

Pie on face? You couldn’t even correctly identify which manager bought Aaron Cresswell. A quick Google search would’ve corrected that for you.

Regarding our academy, we’ve just sold two young lads for about £1.6m this summer. The likes of Dozzell, Nydam, Downes, Kenlock, and Morris are all decent players and some of them have won England youth tournaments. It’s borne more fruit and money for the club than the Keane and Jewell years, that’s for sure.

 

Speaks volumes, doesn’t it? Then for the first few years, which included an actual play off season, you don’t know what you were missing.

 

I still went to some northern away games Nuggets but I never really enjoyed the experience.

 

Seriously? You are holding that up as an achievement?

We have produced some good players from the academy over the time but McCarthy wasted them. It’s very hard to imagine we could have done any worse by our young talent.

 

Winning honours for your country? Certainly. It doesn’t happen often here and it’s impressive that a couple of our lads contributed to that success. Doesn’t any of our young players excite you? Can you seriously not recognise their potential and the involvement that they have had in the first team? Maybe it’s a difference of opinion, but I seriously believe we’ve got a good batch of youngsters coming through this academy now.

True, Mick generally played youth players when we had an injury crisis, but Dozzell looked like an important player last season before his unfortunate injury. And for all McCarthy’s faults, he still have 36 games to Kenlock, 60 games to an injury-prone Bishop, 11 games to Nydam last season, and 10 games to Downes last season.

 

No, I have way higher expectations than this. Every two or three seasons we should be unearthing a Richard Wright, Kieron Dyer or Darren Bent. Woolfenden looks like the first player for a while who may have this kind of quality.

Jack Marriott, Luke Hyam, Teddy Bishop and to a lesser extent Josh Carson all showed this kind of promise but wasted. Teddy Bishop's injury problems have likely been contributed to by his lack of fitness and discipline and for me the manager bears some responsibility for this. Dozzell looks like a decent Championship player but he's not as good as his Dad and is perhaps the third or fourth best midfielder currently at the club. One mistake - fine - but McCarthy just seemed to have a lack of trust or confidence in throwing kids in. When he did it was usually because the season had already gone, or in the cup surrounded by second string players. And then when we lost there would inevitably be a smarmy comment about how they proved they weren't good enough for the first team. Liverpool are happy to blood youngsters in the Champions League but McCarthy was scared to do it in the Championship.

Thankfully now kids are going to have a chance to prove themselves again and if it's Kenlock, Nydam or Downes then brilliant, but I can't see it. Downes looks like the best of those but generally when you have a real star they stand out and it's obvious to everyone.

Very possibly Ben Knight would have stayed if there was a buzz in the first team and there were a couple of shining examples for him to follow at Town, instead it's an absolute no brainer for him to go to City.

 

I admire your optimism, Hampy, and indeed I share your viewpoint that we should be promoting more young players and giving them opportunites. Believe me, we are on the same page here. However, since Keane and Jewell largely neglected the academy, and we failed to gain Category 1 ranking as Evans didn’t rank its importance, we’ve been playing catch up. I don’t think you realise how much of a blow Klug’s departure had on youth development at this club, as he was its biggest advocate, and the fault lies with Keane there.

I also think a wider context needs to be considered. Back in the 90s, and indeed earlier decades, we had the recent Premier League / top division experience, the funding, and the philosophy to attract young players. As soon as Evans bought the club, the reliance and willingness to bring through young footballers was halted in order to bring in short-term, big-money signings to fulfil “Operation Premiership”. Keane, Jewell, and McCarthy were all guilty of ignoring youth, and it is only when Klug returned and laid down the foundations again did talent start coming through. Now we’ve got a decent batch coming through again, hopefully Hurst is the man to nurture these

 

It would need to be quite a "buzz" to outweigh the financial incentives alone in joining Man City!

 

Perhaps where we differ here is really on two points:

1) Klug has been a great servant to this club, but I don't believe he is the only person who could run a successful academy for us. In fact just because he performed outstandingly for us, doesn't mean he will forever.

2) Roy Keane obviously saw ways for us to improve. He had first hand experience of arguably the best academy in the history of football. Do we really value that knowledge at zero? There certainly wasn't any time to find out whether we would now have had a conveyer belt of top class talent, but what we do know for sure is that we don't have one at the moment.

 

1. Agreed that Klug is not the best man in youth development, however based on his experience and what he’s done here, he’s arguably the best we can afford. Of course he also has a wider team whose good work goes under the radar. The fact is we didn’t replace him when he left. In fact, Evans cut back on the academy and neglected it for the years under Keane, Jewell, and the early parts of McCarthy’s reign. To me, this highlights the thinking from the club that youth development was a low objective and that promotion would be achieved by spending money on established players. This view would have been supported by the club management and is evidenced by the high levels of spending made by both Keane and Jewell.

2. I don’t discount Keane’s experience at Manchester United. But I do judge him on what he did for youth development during his time at Ipswich. That answer, looking at the players he used and the signings he made, strongly points to his preference of using established players on big transfers and wages to achieve promotion. I’d argue it would be understandable, considering the demands made of him, if it didn’t go so terribly wrong.

 

Both of these are symptoms of a now or never gamble. That Keane would have us promoted within a season or two.

My argument is that if Keane had stuck around and built the club I think he MIGHT have done a bloody good job of it, and that whatever job he had done of it I think it would have been an improvement on what has transpired instead.

It is not as black and white as people are making out. Roy Keane is no fool. You just can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs.

 

Well I’ll have to agree to disagree Hampy, as we will just be going around in circles. You think Keane could have go on to become a better manager and had success with us. Fair enough. Personally, I don’t think he would have even got us in the play offs.

If there was one manager I’d like to see us give a bit more time to in recent years, I’d rather Jim Magilton got it. We played good football under him, he tried bringing youth players through, and we almost made the play offs in his first two seasons when we weren’t much fancied. With an experienced Director of Football (Joe Royle perhaps) and a stricter budget, who knows what we could have achieved? It’s all speculation, of course. I don’t think we’ve done particularly well since Keane left (Jewell was just as bad, albeit it had a marginally better win ratio than Keane), but I don’t think we’ve done that badly either. It’s clear we need a philosophy and some forward thinking at this football club, my hope is that Hurst and Evans is the partnership to achieve this.

 

Same as you Nuggets Keane was an absolute calamity ( sadly ) with us.

 

The question that should be asked is during the time from Keane's appointment through to Mick's how many players from the Academy:
1) Made their first team debut
2) Went on to play 10+ competitive games for us
3) Have represented their country at age group level

I think on all 3 counts, the recent resurgence of our academy under Klug skew the stats. It is impossible to argue that we had a huge drop in that area once Klug left and his return has shown what a monumental cock up it was to get rid of him in the first place

Also, if you can't see the positivity in the emergence of Dozzell, Downes and Nydam then I don't think supporting Ipswich is for you, as there has been little else to get excited about lately.

 

I don't know where you Keane supporters were at the time but I was watching about 40 matches a season and to suggest that he would have got us promoted with that poor standard of football is quite frankly laughable. Jewell was even worse and hadn't managed a Club for more than2 years before us and to my knowledge not after us either.
McCarthy was what we needed at the time and he succeeded in his brief to save us from relegation, we progressed for a while and looked promising but Evans failure to invest in the January window of the play off season spelt the end of progression and a downward spiral.

 

Completely on the same page as you field.