Cod Almighty | Diary

Placeholders

23 August 2017

When Town got back into the Football League in 2016, I had a lot of thoughts. Most of these were "wahey, we're back in the Football League!" Some of them were "it's a shame we couldn't keep hold of those players". And others were "well, at least the young players will get a chance now".

Between 2010 and 2016 it was especially difficult for the club to give a chance to its young players. Grimsby Town supporters mostly thought it was wrong for the club to be non-League, and every season we spent there meant the club was failing or even dying. Give a run of games to an 18-year-old centre-half and a couple of errors could mean the difference between promotion and stagnation.

Conversely, I thought, the pressure would be off for a couple of years once we made it back up. We could actually try giving a first-team spot to a few of these promising starlets we hear so much about, and if it didn't work out there'd be no serious consequences. We'd have a bit of time and space to develop these players properly and really focus on becoming a sort of new Crewe Alexandra.

So where are we actually up to with Town and youth development? Your original/regular Diary finds the messages a bit mixed and I don't really know what to think.

Since returning to the Football League we have seen several new appointments to the youth coaching set-up at Blundell Park, with job titles that include such progressive if not futuristic terms as "development phase". Neil Woods spoke convincingly of the far-reaching long-term vision for youth development which he shared with Marcus Bignot, who was sacked less than half a year after his appointment. Bignot was replaced by a manager whose commitment to developing young players during his previous spell in charge amounted to precisely zero. Out-of-contract youth team graduate Max Wright was given "a chance to prove himself" in pre-season, which turned out to mean playing one absolute blinder despite being out of position at left-back and then being dropped for the rest of the summer.

I note that Town's youth team have just lost 2-1 against York City in this season's third round of matches in the EFL Youth Alliance North East. I note this from the website of York City, because there doesn't seem to be anything about it at all on Town's newly superb new official website mark VI.

Earlier iterations of the SNOS used to update youth team results once every few weeks, seemingly whenever the web editor remembered, but the current version doesn't even seem to have a fixture list for them,* let alone results. The site also features less information than it used to about the players themselves. Its profiles for these young hopefuls no longer even include a little mugshot and a date of birth.

Would it be too harsh to observe that this degree of neglect effectively borders on contempt? Perhaps. But if you don't know what to think about where Town are with youth development, it's hard not to conclude that the club sees little point featuring the youth team on the website because it's pretty much given up on them IRL. Instead of pictures of real players, we have placeholders. And from the outside at least, it looks like that's all that these young lads are to the club: placeholders. Put there to make it look like someone's working on something, until they're taken down and replaced with something else.

It wouldn't be right to suggest that this problem begins and ends at Blundell Park. If you want to know how those lads got on in their first two games, well, you'd be in for a bit of a journey. I went to the Football League's website, clicked on the menu, and came up against this.

Right at the bottom there – can you see it? – there's a link to 'Youth Development'. Click on that and you get a few words about the academy system and EPPP, with a link to a charter for players and parents. There's still no sign of how to find the results of youth matches.

So I went to Google and searched for "EFL Youth Alliance North East". This brings up a load of hits from the official websites of Lincoln City, Notts County and other clubs – nothing suggesting a site or page devoted to the competition itself. So then I tried just "EFL Youth Alliance". This brings up a page buried deep on the Football League's website where, finally, you can access results and fixtures for the youth teams – by downloading them as PDFs. I know. (It turns out that Town won 3-0 at Doncaster on 5 August, then lost 3-2 at home to Mansfield a week later.)

But what could possibly be important enough to push this information so far down into the Football League's website that you need tweezers to extract it from Shaun Harvey's arse? Oh.

This, of course, reminds us that the Football League is very keen on helping with the development of young players – just not its own.

The situation at GTFC, then, is symptomatic of a wider problem. Is it even worth the time and expense for any lower-division side to develop young players properly when the EPPP system allows the Premier League to harvest all the half-decent ones and leave them in a barn to rot? If it makes sense to do it at all, you'd expect at least one or two of the 72 clubs in the Football League to have found a way to do it properly. But there isn't even a solitary Crewe Alexandra any more.

*After this diary was published, it was pointed out that forthcoming youth team fixtures can be found via a drop-down menu on the SNOS's main fixture page. We still can't find the results of matches they've already played though.