Sir Trevor Brooking slams 'vacuum of leadership' in English youth football

[dww]

Rafa is obviously of this opinion and youngsters like Insua, Spearing, Darby etc have, and will be, gradually blooded and given the chance to be part of the first team squad playing with better players until they are 22 or so and hopefully will develop into decent squad players maybe more. You cant expect them to be pulling up trees at 18, that type of player is very rare, not many are going to be like Owen or Rooney at that age. David Silva, for example, has only made just over 100 appearances for Valencia and he's 23/24. He's obviously been given time to develop, in England he would probably have been discarded at 18 for being too small.

The thing is though that the mentality is so ingrained in everyone in the football world in this country. Even supporters write players off if they haven't 'made it' by 21. There were a number of threads a year or so back which accused Rafa of being short termist with his youth policies. Which I said then and still think is the opposite of the truth.

It will be very interesting to see how our youth/reserve setup develops now Rafa has control and is installing his own people. The sad thing is though that people will be demanding results in a season or two despite the fact that that is pretty much impossible.

[Guest]

I thought she was a Hertha Berlin fan