Am I the only one worried by what most of us want?

Was it "Harry" Bassett ?

 

On a more serious note. Given we don't have the wherewithal or the desire to bankrupt ourselves competing for a limited pool of talent 25k a week for Lee Peltier just being noble ludicrous example. Then the main route available to us is to spend money developing our own players. In reality including 2 or 3 with another couple on the bench will probably be the limit of this dream and even those targets are fairly stretching. I think we need to look at Crewe and pre Italian money Watford as decent examples of what can be achieved.

I think it's achievable and desirable but is a long term strategy and we need to empower a manager to achieve this aim. In Danny we have someone with a proven track record in thus area so I guess we are lucky in that.

Jamil Adam that lad will play for England one day...


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Agnew

 

Anthony Kay no world beater but never disgraced himself.


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In 2005, we once played a fixture with 11 Academy lads in the 15 man squad

Its an often overlooked fact but we did try to turn out a Home Grown side.

I'll post the details up here later but in the meantime does anyone remember where and when ??

 

Re: In 2005, we once played a fixture with 11 Academy lads in the 15 man squad

I remember we got stuffed 5-0 away at Port Vale with a load of academy lads in the squad. Dunno if that was it.

 

Spot on. I thought I wouldn't get that past you.

It was obviously an attempt to play the maximum available Home Grown players and as you pointed out resulted in a 5-0 thumping.

April 24th 2005 Port Vale away

Flinders
Tonge
Williams
Kaye
Wroe
Jarman
Reid
McPhail
Johnson
Shuker
Burns

Subs
Scarsella
Laight
Atkinson
Joynes
Austin

Around the same time Middlesbrough played a fixture at Fulham with a starting Academy XI

 

I hope that I am wrong, but the impression I got from Ben Mansford's recent Audioboo interview with Radio Sheffield was of someone who has collected the thoughts of fans and who was replaying those thoughts back to them without putting the ideas that he had collected though any intelligent sieve to pick out the good ideas from the bad. He was simply relating the BFC policy of the last 50 years, putting it through his enthusiasm generator and relaying it back to the fans in the guise of new ideas. The ideas were not new ideas, they were not revolutionary ideas, they were just the same old stuff.

Ben is coming towards the end of his honeymoon period. He seems to have written off the chances of increasing commercial revenue at the club and I am wondering if he is capable of changing the clubs direction in any tangible way. So far, he looks to be a younger version of Don Rowing and has a sole achievement of taking the club down a division. As I have argued in the past, the team manager and the chief executive are different faces of the same problem. Their joint aim is to find success on the field. The team manager does this through performances on the field. The chief executive does this through increasing revenue streams so as to increase playing budgets so that better players can be recruited. They succeed or fall together and they should be viewed together by fans as part of the same management team.

 

Even with the amount of academy lads in the squad, we shouldn't have lost that game 5-0 to Port Vale, who came close to being relegated. It's pretty much a first choice midfield and all the defenders had played a number of games that season. I can only think of Bobby Hassell who would have maybe improved the defence and even he was having his worst season for Barnsley. The others (Vaughan, Carbon and Tom Williams) were just rubbish. I think our players were already on the beach.

If I'd looked up that match, I wouldn't have got it. I'm guessing the 11th academy player is Scarsella, but I thought we'd signed him from an Australian team.

I have next to no recollection at all of Simon Johnson, unless he was the lad who scored directly from a corner, I know one of our loan players did around that time. Even if that was Johnson, I can't remember anything else about him.

 

On loan from Leeds. Striker/winger, remember he scored a screamer.

 

Yep, he scored twice for us both in a 2-2 draw at home to Oldham. Played reight wing.

 

Neither Digby nor RNL are as injury prone as Steve Agnew was at the same age. Yet it didn't stop him from having a long career. Eric Winstanley picked up a serious knee injury when he was a lad that usually, at that time, finished a player's career (wasn't he out for a year or two?). But our youngest ever captain came back to play more games for Barnsley than anyone else, with the exception of Barry Murphy.
The main criteria for any player to be considered for a regular place in the first team squad is ability. If said player has been produced by our Academy, so much the better. I don't know whether any of the current crop meet this criteria, but then again I don't know that they don't. However, I certainly won't write off any of our young lads before they've had their opportunity to show what they're capable of.

 

Parkin, Morgan?