I'd have thought that with less money than the teams you are currently competing against you would be reliant for maintaining your current position on smart dealings on the transfer market by a clever young manager, assiduous scouting and recruitment of talented unknowns in league two and non-league football, AND developing your own youngsters. There has to be an advantage to being small in the youth development area. Chelsea for instance, have created a giant loan and rejection system, which brings through precious few youngsters to first team level. A smart Huddersfield could be so very different.
I don't get U-23 football. If you are 22 and nowhere near the first team at Huddersfield, you should be playing for Chesterfield. Your career could be over at 30. If you haven't really started it at 23 and you're playing ticcy-taccy to impress a youth coach - the clock is accelerating big time.
I reckon the big gap appears after the age of 17. At Chesterfield we find ourselves with several promising players of that age and if they can't make the first team, because we've filled it with failing loanees from Premier League clubs etc. we have precisely nothing to do with them but send them on a series of third-rate loans. The result is we tend to create players who star in the Evo-Stick, because that's what we've trained them to do.
For a club like Huddersfield it should be relatively easy to avoid both the Chesterfield scenario and the numbers game that a Chelsea will play. Despite their success on the field they bring through precious few youngsters. Loftus-Cheek might make it with them, who before him, John Terry? And when they've bought a young player who seems only to have reached the verge of their best eighteen, does he develop and come through. Ask Kevin de Bruyne and Mo Salah.
I reckon jjamez hits one nail on the head talking about technique and skills. Of course you should be seeing them even in raw recruits and of course you should be developing them. I'd have also said that if you are small you can afford to be flexible. Players develop at different rates. You don't have to discard a lad because he has promise but isn't quite where you'd like at 17. If his attitude's right, why not see how develops, see if he grows, see if he starts to fill out and win tackles? And for chrissakes don't maroon him and his mates in a desert of youth footballers all trying to play "the right way" to impress coaches rather than win games. The aim of any game is for somebody to win and somebody to lose. Lads have to learn to play with and against men and they need to learn how to win, how playing in a really competitive game feels ........ because there is no point in all the skill and technique in the world if a nasty piece of work from Stevenage can cancel it out in the first ten with a couple of tackles.
But if you can't compete to buy the top ready-made talent, what option have you long-term, but to find smart ways of recruiting and developing talent?
I don't get U-23 football. If you are 22 and nowhere near the first team at Huddersfield, you should be playing for Chesterfield. Your career could be over at 30. If you haven't really started it at 23 and you're playing ticcy-taccy to impress a youth coach - the clock is accelerating big time.
I reckon the big gap appears after the age of 17. At Chesterfield we find ourselves with several promising players of that age and if they can't make the first team, because we've filled it with failing loanees from Premier League clubs etc. we have precisely nothing to do with them but send them on a series of third-rate loans. The result is we tend to create players who star in the Evo-Stick, because that's what we've trained them to do.
For a club like Huddersfield it should be relatively easy to avoid both the Chesterfield scenario and the numbers game that a Chelsea will play. Despite their success on the field they bring through precious few youngsters. Loftus-Cheek might make it with them, who before him, John Terry? And when they've bought a young player who seems only to have reached the verge of their best eighteen, does he develop and come through. Ask Kevin de Bruyne and Mo Salah.
I reckon jjamez hits one nail on the head talking about technique and skills. Of course you should be seeing them even in raw recruits and of course you should be developing them. I'd have also said that if you are small you can afford to be flexible. Players develop at different rates. You don't have to discard a lad because he has promise but isn't quite where you'd like at 17. If his attitude's right, why not see how develops, see if he grows, see if he starts to fill out and win tackles? And for chrissakes don't maroon him and his mates in a desert of youth footballers all trying to play "the right way" to impress coaches rather than win games. The aim of any game is for somebody to win and somebody to lose. Lads have to learn to play with and against men and they need to learn how to win, how playing in a really competitive game feels ........ because there is no point in all the skill and technique in the world if a nasty piece of work from Stevenage can cancel it out in the first ten with a couple of tackles.
But if you can't compete to buy the top ready-made talent, what option have you long-term, but to find smart ways of recruiting and developing talent?