Sadly, in these difficult C19 times each squad I would think each must have its own bubble and therefore switching between bubbles cannot be done without going through the isolating and testing process. Therefore it would be difficult to add non bubble players at short notice!

100% agree! Think if you ask any of those players - go to Etihad or play U23, they would choose the trip to Manchester. And still be able to take part in the U23 game today, because Roy H. would never have given them any game time vs Man s***ty.

Respectfully, you are missing the point, they would not be able to switch bubbles at short notice without observing the c19 protocol set up by the PL to allow games to take place, therefore no u23 player would have been allowed to travel and mix with the PL squad. Roy is an experienced Manager and if he could have added a full bench by adding U23 players then he almost certainly would have done!

The fact that the youngsters were not there is more telling because of the fact that they never even made it into Roy’s thought process.

He would rather play an old hand totally out of position than play a youngster in their correct position. Oh sorry I forgot, he already does that, sometimes all over the pitch.

Richard Shaw said this sometime back and I think left shortly afterwards ? Perhaps Roy is saying the same thing but not directly ?

“ [T]here are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that, we now know we don't know.But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know. ”
—United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld

I hop over the wall to the other Palace forum occasionally but the only thread that I read is the Academy thread as there are a couple of people who contribute there that seem to know quite a bit about what goes on in the academy and they basically say the say thing as Richard Shaw did