The Official EDS and Academy Thread 2013/14

Status
Not open for further replies.
Nelly's Left Foot said:
another generation said:
FantasyIreland said:
For those interested.......Mini derby(u18's) tomorrow morning.
Click to expand...
Where and when?
Click to expand...

Platt Lane at 11 am
Click to expand...


The Rag perspective.........

United’s U18s will be looking to get back on track on Saturday morning as they take on Manchester City in the season’s first mini-derby at Platt Lane.

Last week’s 3-1 reverse against an impressive Aston Villa ended a run of six straight wins for Paul McGuinness’ side and things don’t get any easier as they make the short trip to face their local rivals, especially as a number of key players will likely miss out after playing their part in the U19s’ midweek UEFA Youth League defeat in Donetsk.

Defenders Nicholas Ioannou and Callum Evans, midfielders Sean Goss and Josh Harrop and striker James Wilson all featured extensively out in Ukraine and are expected to sit this one out, offering opportunities to a number of new scholars and schoolboys. Cameron Borthwick-Jackson and Jordan Thompson are likely to deputise at the back, while Wilson’s continued absence due to involvement at higher age groups should mean last week’s goalscorer Devonte Redmond again partners top scorer Ashley Fletcher in attack.

The probable absence of Goss and Harrop will mean something of a reshuffle in midfield, with Joe Riley, Scott McTominay, Ruairi Croskery and Marcus Rashford amongst the candidates to join regulars Matthew Willock and Demetri Mitchell in the engine room.

Tomorrow’s hosts come into the game six points behind the Reds in the nascent league table and having lost their last three, but a run of four straight wins at the start of the campaign provides ample evidence of the danger posed by Jason Wilcox’s team. Midweek European exertions may also affect their team selection, but recent England U18 call-ups Brandon Barker and Ashley Smith-Brown are ones to watch, along with Tosin Adarabioyo, whose brother Fisayo was on trial with the Reds in pre-season.

The game kicks off at 11am at City’s Platt Lane academy complex in the Fallowfield/Rusholme area of Manchester, with entry free of charge to all spectators.

Predicted United XI: Joel Pereira; Ben Barber, Ryan McConnell (c), Cameron Borthwick-Jackson, Jordan Thompson; Marcus Rashford, Matthew Willock, Joe Riley/Scott McTominay, Demetri Mitchell; Devonte Redmond, Ashley Fletcher.
 
Good interview with Paddy V from the Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/...l-star-on-englands-coaching-woes-8860005.html

Patrick Vieira synchronises his new Manchester City academy squad’s training sessions with the first team’s so some of that elite class might rub off, but the senior players have been the ones needing a little of what the juniors are drinking this week. The scoreline Manchester City 6 Bayern Munich 0 – registered by the Under-19s in a Uefa Youth League match on Wednesday afternoon – was obscured by what Pep Guardiola’s players dished out, having breezed into the Etihad in their elegant three-piece suits four hours later. It was a breathtaking football exposition from Vieira’s players, though. His 17-year-old Portuguese captain, Marcos Lopes, was sometimes unplayable in the course of completing a hat-trick.

“They’re young, they’re young!” says Vieira’s assistant Christian Lattanzio, gesturing that we must keep a lid on expectation because these boys don’t need to let this result run away with them. Lattanzio’s several branches of expertise include sports psychology, so he would know.

There’s actually been more talk around Manchester about City’s overwhelmingly Mancunian Under-14s and Under-13s – both English national champions last season. But Vieira and his boys have made some impact on the new Uefa competition. It’s a sign of how obsessive City’s attempts to develop young talent have become that their chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak, a man more accustomed to handling multimillion-pound Abu Dhabi investment funds, was in the 1,500 crowd at Hyde on Wednesday to view a starting XI which included five young Englishmen.

City’s chief executive Ferran Soriano says he told Vieira last year that it was time to decide whether his future was going to be “in the office or on the turf” and there are grounds to believe that the Home Nations might be a beneficiary of his decision to take the latter and assume custodianship of City’s Elite Development Squad. The 17-year-old Dubliner Jack Byrne was Vieira’s most influential player in Plzen a fortnight ago, elegantly running the midfield in a 4-1 win, and also flourished against the Germans. The Mancunian defender Shay Facey offers promise.

Vieira’s agonies about the English football nation stem from its habit of obsessing over the volume of foreigners in the Premier League when it might be getting to grips with developing more British youngsters capable of playing alongside them. We have arrived at another of those international breaks when the paucity of English players will dominate the football narrative.

Bayern deployed six Germans at the Etihad on Wednesday; England’s four Champions League sides mustered 10 between them. “But for me, this is the way to hide what is the real problem in this country,” Vieira tells The Independent. “The problem is deeper than just saying there are too many foreigners and for me that is the comment everybody wants to hear.

“When you see so many kids playing the game and so few being top players, you have to say something is wrong somewhere. I think England has to change the way they are teaching football, because football is changing and the method isn’t changing as much.”

The issues boil down to the fact that the young players City receive from the Continent generally do possess a better technical component. The likes of Lopes (below) have “more knowledge of the game, I will say: the football knowledge,” Vieira says, his seat in his Carrington office facing that of the director of football, Txiki Begiristain – peering intently into a laptop; perhaps planning another of the acquisitions which Vieira’s work is designed to render less of a requirement.

“On the other hand, there is so much passion and love for the game among the youth [in England] that you don’t always have elsewhere,” adds Vieira. “That is essential. But now it’s more about the creativity. How do you move around the pitch to be in the right places? How do you control and pass? It sounds really simple but at the end it’s complex and really difficult.

“So England should start from the grass-roots. You need the facilities – and even though you look at St George’s Park, the facilities have to improve. And if you have the right project, you need to educate the coaches. Because you can have the best project in the world but if you don’t have the right people to deliver to the kids, it’s worthless.”

The superior Continental technique accrues from longer hours, too, he says. When Vieira was a young player coming through the dormitory existence of French academies – the centres de formation – at FC Drouais and Tours, he would not see his home for a week. “When you are 14, 15, 16 you can train every day in France and sometimes you can train twice a day,” he says. “You train far more in France than in England. Here, we still see football as a game. Football is a job. There is still the mentality where training is at 11, you come in at 10.30 and when it is finished you leave straight away. No….” So life has suddenly changed for his City boys: there are three double training sessions and two singles, each week. Their lives are at Carrington.

What Vieira and the club are attempting to inculcate is a single way to play: creating an awareness in players, as they move the ball out from the back, of how “to find the right position to receive the ball in the right place and play it forward. How to give a lot of solutions to the players who get the ball”. And how to maintain that philosophy whether they are winning or losing.

“It’s not about the result but how you can deal with certain situations. How you can deal with the game when you are winning 1-0, there are 10 or 15 minutes to go and the other team are pushing. Are you maybe going to change the system to go more defensive? No. You need to deal with winning 1-0. Keep the ball better and select the right time to go forward. And if you are losing 1-0 with 10 minutes to go, how can you be more offensive and keep in the same system? You can push the block forward and put them under pressure and not let them get it out. Winning is not important. It’s how you can deal with the situation at this age.”

Some want to learn more than others. City’s academy head, Mark Allen, tells a story about Lopes being unexpectedly asked across to join first-team training last season and sprinting back to the academy ranks when that session had finished – to illustrate that rather British trait of ridiculing those who do the extra work. “I am sorry to say it is especially true in British football,” Allen says. “It’s a case of ‘Look at him, he’s busy’ or ‘He wants to get on the right side of the coach’. But it’s your career, so just get on with it.” Vieira grimaces. “Yes, I do see that.”

Some of the challenges are less resolvable. Soriano and his Manchester United counterpart Ed Woodward both yearn, for example, to be allowed to put reserve teams through the lower professional leagues – and both know that it will never happen. Vieira recalls his days playing for Cannes reserves in the lower reaches of the French pyramid and a hostile trip to play Corsica, in particular.

“It’s tough. You grow up. The [Premier League’s] Under-21 division is better than last year but it’s taking too long to improve. The gap between the Under-21 and the first team is massive. That is why so many boys from the Under-21 have failed to make the leap to the first team.”

It was not his players’ recent 6-3 defeat to Tottenham Hotspur’s academy – “a really good game; we stuck to our philosophy” – which frustrated Vieira, but the fact that the game took place on an academy pitch. “No atmosphere. No crowd. It’s was like a training game.”

The clatter of boots tells us that his players are assembling outside. “Too soon to know,” Soriano says, to the question of whether any from this group could serve Manuel Pellegrini. But every self-respecting City fan will tell you that they were the last side to win the league by fielding a team of 11 Englishmen – 45 long years ago.
Click to expand...
 
Just reading the OS where it claims we have extended our "unbeaten" run at u18 level with a 2.2 draw with Exeter?? . Why is the word "unbeaten" being used when the the party line coming out of the club at u18 & u21 levels is that it's not about winning?? I'm getting confused now. Is it winning when we win? Unbeaten when we draw ? And development and learning when we lose? The sooner the club comes out and confesses that behind the scenes it's all of the three and get rid of the winnings not important fluffy nonsense for the public the better. I like Vierra and I'm told recently he told the dressing room it's a must win game, then lost it and told us and the nation it's not about winning? I think we are in good hands with PV but really hope he puts that winning talent he has inside him into our talented boys to take our club on even further. The day Patrick Vierra says its not about winning is the day all the other clubs grow inches and we become vulnerable in my eyes. If he talks about winning as an art and a target I can smell the fear now from other clubs. Learning and winning in style should be the mandate for football u18 upwards and we should promote the word Win not dismiss it.
 
greasedupdeafguy said:
Chelsea vs city 11am tomorrow, should be streams as its live on CFCTV.
Click to expand...

Losing 2-0 at halftime. Couple of streams available at the usual sites.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Unread Posts

Don't have an account? Register now and see fewer ads!

SIGN UP
Back
Top
✖
  AdBlock Detected
Bluemoon relies on advertising to pay our hosting fees. Please support the site by disabling your ad blocking software to help keep the forum sustainable. Thanks.