Players and fans as one as Cardiff’s incredible reaction to Sala tragedy continues.

Cardiff City mauve and yellow army. | A Cardiff City blog covering six decades of supporting the club – in association with The Owl Centre.

 

He's missed a lot of this season with injury and so he has not had the impact this time around that he did last year - the heartening thing is that, based on the evidence of this season, there are a few with a chance in the Academy currently.

 

Thanks for your kind words. For me, the current Under 18 team have proved that they are the best team at that level that we've had since we were given Academy status in 2004. In that time, we've never had a team that has topped their league for as long as this one has and although I always try to remember the refrain about results not being everything in age group football, the fact that this lots record is so much better than their predecessors must count for something.
Therefore, I think this group would have done well even if Craig Bellamy was not involved with the club, but the fact of the matter is that we have a side topping their league within a year or two of him becoming involved, whereas we usually tend to finish in the fifth to eighth area of a ten team league - maybe results have become more important under Bellamy?
The football the Under 18s played yesterday was a long way removed from what we see from the first team, but a similarity was that when they attacked it was done at speed - they may be much more of a passing team than the first eleven, but they played a direct kind of passing game as opposed to the passing for passing's sake approach you see from some senior sides at all levels of the professional game.
It's hard to make predictions with this sort of thing, but I would say that if, as has been the case at the club for too long, none of the current group of fifteen to eighteen year olds break into the first team, then there needs to be a serious look at how the club goes about its youth development when players get into their late teens.

 

I could ramble on for ages about this, but I'll try and keep my answer brief. One way of looking at the issue is to say that we've just not had any youngsters good enough to become first team regulars since Joe Ralls (who only spent a season or two at Cardiff's Academy) emerged in 2011. I think it's a bit more complicated than that and believe that, generally speaking, our managers have been very reluctant to trust young players since then. I agree the sort of relegation battle we're in now is not the time or place to throw a youngster in for a debut, but there always seems to be an excuse at Cardiff - last season Neil Warnock said it wasn't a year for picking young players after we'd played about four games!

I can remember us having a period of about two months at the end of the dismal 14/15 season when it was clear we would not be going up or down. Surely a run of about ten matches with nothing really on them was an ideal opportunity to give youth a try, but Russell Slade (the worst Cardiff manager I've seen when it comes to youth development) opted not to do so - if kids were not given an opportunity in a situation like that, when will they ever be?