Cotter 0 Posted March 10, 2011 Share Posted March 10, 2011 I must admit I'm fairly optimistic about this lot. I particularly like the thought of a Hutton/Ness central pairing with Wylde on the left and Davis on the right. Gie it a bash Walter....Naw? Aye ok, ok playstation it is. 0 Quote Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
calscot 0 Posted March 10, 2011 Share Posted March 10, 2011 You make it all sound really promising - I haven't seen many games this year as I live too far away and refuse to pay a small fortune for sky. I actually miss Setanta... We had a decent looking crop about 7 years ago - and only MacGregor is left, so maybe this crop can be better and we can hang on to some of the best of them. I don't hold my breath too much for kids as often they either show early promise but don't make the grade, or they look really good and are sold off. Or they don't make the grade, are sold for peanuts and become a star player... I think some of the greater focus on kids is a bit of desperation as we've such a small squad and little money for new players of any quality and so we can only dream our pool of young talent can come good as dreaming of big signings is more futile. I think the type of football we're playing is representative of the standard of players we can afford. I think it's much better football than in the early 80's when I really started to follow the team properly - but not as good as from Souness till Advocaat's second season (and even then there were plenty of dire games). However, in that era we were competing with top English and European clubs for players. We were the equivalent of Arsenal. If you looked at the bottom teams of the old 1st division or the top of the 2nd, their football then was pretty poor. We can't even compete for players with them now, so what do we really expect? I'm sure if you took our team and played them against the best footballing team in your Sunday League then they would play fantastic football, and the Sunday League team would look like they'd never played before. However, when you're up against teams who have the second tier of talent in the whole country and not only that are more organised and tactically aware than they ever were in the '90's, then it's just not as easy. Yet we're still scoring well over two goals in a game which I think is better than most of the Souness years. The fact that the youth are looking good may be because they don't have to rise to the stature of Laudrup, Gough or Numan. But once their youthful exuberance is curbed by older opposition players punishing them for naivety and mistakes, they may not look any better than what we've got. 0 Quote Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
aftershock 0 Posted March 10, 2011 Share Posted March 10, 2011 Calscot, I agree that if we put all of them in at the same time it would not work. But we keep seeing young players appear in the first team, do well then they disappear again with more experienced replacing them who are playing terrible week in, week out. As for the shit signings, I don't mean them all but surely we have better youth than players like Beattie, Lafferty and Edu? 0 Quote Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
calscot 0 Posted March 10, 2011 Share Posted March 10, 2011 Granted, those three signings are not playing well for us - but they still have talent. Even the latter two are current, full internationals who, only a few years ago were considered the cream of the rising talent. Beattie was once Everton's record signing and has been punted around for a total of about �£15M and earned 5 caps for England. If international players are shit signings, then who should we be signing? The danger is that if we have even loftier expectations of our youngsters than that lot, then what will happen if they are not hugely better than that trio? Will the fans get on their back like many before them - Adam is a good example? I think they get a lot more slack and more sympathetic eye than established players to start with - but once they play regularly, a few poor performances will have us wanting to dump them for the next new kid on the block. This is why they need to be protected and eased into the side. I am genuinely pleased we have a good crop of youngsters and hope they have a good part to play - and they seem to be getting reasonable game time, but I don't see the rush to establish them in front of players who are older have already been where the young guys are now - and learned a lot since. 0 Quote Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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