All about opinions but I donāt agree that our youth players have been āheld on a pedestalā Name one of them. Incidentally if our youth set rarely produces decent players why are we investing in it?
It does produce 'decent' players fairly quite often. I was alluding to the fact that Cooper is a special talent, which doesn't come along very often. A realistic aim for our academy should be to produce one or two players for the first team from each intake. It doesn't sound like very many, but not all academies are Cobham or Hale End. Even elite teams struggle to produce regular first team talents for their own team.
Name a player that was put on a pedestal? Tyler Harvey, frequently. Alex Fletcher, even more so than Harvey. I once said he wasn't fit to lace Ryan Taylor's boots and got absolutely slaughtered on here. Adam Randell to an extent, everyone was calling for us to play him the second Houghton had one bad performance (despite him being a standout player for the first half of the season). There was criticism of the club after Isaac Vassell made a name for himself, despite the fact he is crap, always has been, just happens to be very fast, not that that has stopped people suggesting we re-sign him. Then there's the "we will regret this!" attitude towards players we release which i've already touched on.
On top of that, there is the inadvertent criticism of young loanees because they are not one of our own, (e.g Tyrese Fornah who had a number of decent performances for us).
And the real irony of it all is the youth player who gets the most criticism that I can remember in recent times, Luke Jephcott, is one of the genuine success stories of our academy!
