Rogues Gallery wrote:
It's a major problem in that one players get to 20 -21 - 22 years old and have not established themselves in the first team, what does a club do with them.
The three over 20's in the U20 team rule makes it difficult, and so the majority move on. The other option is to loan players out on dual contract, but even in that case many of the players tend to move on, Ainscough, Walker, Smith, Emmitt, Dean, Tyrer etc.
It must be a very difficult for a club in deciding who to keep.
To be honest Rogues if a young player has not made it by the time they are 21/22 then they are not going to make it. A lot is made out about your team letting go a lot of young players but in reality very few have prooved Wigan wrong. The same can be said about Saints, even the natural ability of Lee Briers has not been enough to prove that Saints reservations about his professionalism were wrong.
I personally think it a good thing that the 20/25 rule and the salary cap exist. It forces clubs to find out if their young players are good enough and if not they are allowed to go to a club who will.
The bottom line is that Paul is a good player who should be playing in Superleague but is probably not good enough to play at Saints given the quality of the other players coming through. In the past a lot of good Saints juniors that have only just fallen off the radar after just missing out at Saints.
I guess that a lot of clubs know who they are going to keep. Foster vs Armstrong and Dean Vs Wheeler are great examples of this. For a long time it looked like Armstrong and Dean were going to make it at Saints but Wheeler and Foster had always showed more promise in the juniors and the club gave them more time to prove themselves so eventually they got the first team contracts.
