In a lot of jobs and I know football is not just a job; under pressure is where a majority do their best. Footballers can mature in five minutes, AWB,mitchell,Rooney,Lampard,gerard. All players who showed ability whilst under pressure to. These are just examples and if they hadnt had their chance then we would never have known how good they were.
Some players clearly arnt close and wont ever make the top but a few could just have that x factor and be so near to being able to show but the chance never comes through a fear of failure;not by them but by others!

That does seem to be a recurring theme.

I appreciate that to some extent you only know for certain whether a player is good enough if you play him in the first team, but we have to remember that the youth system (staffed by qualified experienced professionals) is there not only to coach the youth lads, but also to assess their suitability to be first team players, or even just professional footballers, as well.

Many years ago I was taking the FA coaching badges and was in the same class as Dougie Freedman, who at that time was the reserve manager at Palace. He told me the story of one particular youth team player who I won't name here, but who did play a few games in the Palace first team as a very young player before falling out of professional football altogether.

Anyway, this kid had issues with his approach, and particular to how well he took care of his body. The staff had several meetings with the kid and his parents in which they pleaded with them to focus more and make lifestyle changes because, to use Dougies words, if he can sort that side out then he will definitely be a professional footballer - not maybe, definitely.

Despite getting a taste of the first team very young, the kid didn't (or couldn't) make the lifestyle changes, but the point of the story really is that it was possible, in Freedmen's telling of it, to have a pretty high degree of certainty about a young players potential without having to test them on a sink-or-swim basis in the first team. Makes sense really - that's what the staff and the system is there for.

So, what might be a more fair way to put it is:

You only know for certain if a kid is good enough by playing him in the first team, but you normally have a pretty good idea of how likely he is to succeed long before then.

Another angle to look at it might be that if the youth set up prior to the recent upgrades etc was producing a player a year that was good enough then the club wouldn't have needed to spend what it has upgrading the whole thing.

Edited by TheBigToePunt (08 Feb 2021 12.51pm)

Bring back Razor Ruddock

Funny old 'youth' team we've got, half of them seem to have beards!

Learn!!!!

Americans banned it in the early 1930s but found the smuggling and illegal side impossible to control due to the huge scale, the law enforcers found themselves picking on the easier targets which everyone knows causes huge problems in itself with discontent probably cost more then the drink in the first place lol Alcohol has caused quite a lot of the spread of this covid 19.