[Dancingwilldoit]

Oud-Heverlee Leuven do play in the Belgian Second Tier. However, finishing fifth in it suggests they'd at least give the Owls a tight game. Their owners are the King Power Group after all!

David Hirst must have massive influence if connections gained the 40 age group caps George won with England from U-17 to U20. He scored 17 goals in those games. YET the Owls gave him only one first team game. Are they suffering from Chelsea syndrome?

Last season he played 22 times for OH Leuven but only netted three times. Nevertheless England selected him in the squad for the 2019 Toulon tournament.

One of Wednesday's great problems is that since their fall from grace they have not developed an efficient development strategy to identify and bring through the host of talent available in a strong football area, which should be a goldmine. If you haven't got big money you have to have other strategies. Like Chesterfield they've been pretty clueless and continue to lack a strategy which will return a great club to the level at which it SHOULD be playing.

When George Hirst was 17 and the best centre forward of his age in England apparently I suggested Wednesday should loan him to Chesterfield. Kevin Davies for us at 16 played in Division One and had to be double man-marked. Instead Wednesday created a player who eventually had to leave the country with obscurity running neck and neck with success in his future. Little wonder the players, justly or unjustly behind him in the pecking order, ended up disillusioned and out of the game.

Jack Waddle is a good comparison, because whatever his level of talent he followed the Chesterfield development route which takes players to Sheffield FC and Matlock and they end up up scattered around Step 5-ish of non-league football ..... which is very much the level we've trained them to become. It is almost an accident when a Darikwa or a Bowery succeeds despite the system and makes a pro-career. What will we do to Levi Amantchi and Joe Rowley this season?

The lesson of David Hirst and Chris Waddle is that despite their influence and their sons' being steeped in football throughout their lives, knowing all the right things to say and do and how the games works .......... they struggled. Yet Belgium, where young Hirst went, from a much smaller pool of potential players can parade a full squad of players whose signatures the world's richest and most successful clubs would covet.

If having a dad who knows the system intimately doesn't do it for you there's likely something wrong with the system.

Or theres something wrong with the Dad