DubaiSpur
Ian Walker
That's a noble enough endeavor, if we're sure the youth players we're making way for are good enough to occupy the places we've seemingly reserved for them. However, of our current crop, I don't see many ready to make the jump into the first team right away, and generally even when they are ready (I believe Pritchard definitely is, for example), my view is that the place for these youngsters should be behind our first eleven (on the bench or in the 25) with their brief being to show enough in training to make the step up when a first-teamer gets injured or loses form.
For example, for now I see CCV as being a couple of good years away from being able to slot into the side, and concurrently, I can't see Jan staying for more than another season, with doubts over Fazio's longer-term future as well (again, I can't see him staying past, say, 2017): that's space that CCV (along with Veljkovic, for example) can move into, and is also why I'm not too crazy about signing another CB in the near-term. However, my view is that our youth players (CCV and Veljkovic, in this instance) should start at the bottom of the list when it comes to the pecking order our four CBs are arranged in (with the other two being Dier and Wimmer, presumably), moving up as an when the opportunity presents itself.
I feel that I do harbour disagreements with Gutter over this, since he seems a lot more gung-ho about throwing our lads into the first-team straight away, which for me would only send us careening backwards as a team and as a side ostensibly competing for things. No doubt, we've got talent at the back (Veljkovic in the short term, CCV and KWP in the slightly longer term) and in midfield (Onomah and Winks in the short-term, Yahaya, Azzaoui, that Serbian chap (Lazar?) and Edwards in the medium term) that I'd love to see work their way into the side. But crucially, they shouldn't be given a straight role into the first eleven/eighteen. Use them to replace the players on the fringes of the first team that we're planning to ship out (Stambouli, Capoue et al), or start them at the bottom of the list as our more established players leave (the gradual departure of Verts, Fazio, Eriksen, Chadli et al) but don't use it as an excuse to avoid signing players that would benefit the first eleven.
). I suspect my gripe is more with Gutter's gung-ho youth policy than it is with anything you've pointed out.
