v Bradford City (h) - 12/8/25 - Carabao Cup

[RoverCanada]

Re: a yearly Academy minutes target...: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law And who counts in that regard? Surely Carter, Travis, Wharton, Buckley, etc still count as the Academy paying off (to mixed effect).

The worth/output of the Academy needs to be assessed over 5-10 year windows. Decent players like Travis, Nyambe, JRC, etc should emerge every 2-3 years, while you hope unicorns like A. Wharton or Jones emerge every 5-7 years. (Just pulling those numbers out of my ass, but would be interesting to see how our output compares to other Cat 1 academies, on a per pupil basis of course!)

Expecting/financially imposing that 1-2 Academy lads will break through every year is insane.

[rigger]

5 hours ago, alexanders said:

What I find most worrying after yesterdays game and saturdays game is our inability to create goalscoring chances. 
we don’t seem to have a good plan and look very easy to defend against. 
 

With that said we have absolutely made it super difficult for us by going down in the first minutes. This makes it even easier to defend against, because the teams can just with a low block and we don’t get the space required to create chances. 

We had five guilt edged chances four in the first half, one in the second, we scored one of them. They had four, two in each half and scored two of them.

[M_B]

53 minutes ago, DuffsLeftPeg said:

We only played 3 youngsters, 2 of which got minutes in the Championship last season. The rest of the team are seasoned professionals and/or recent first team signings. There are no excuses for losing, especially with a bench full of our very best players (if you can call them that!).

I’m hoping the new look team can kick on, starting with a win on Saturday which would change everything. But so far the signs aren’t looking good!

After the disastrous start, I thought we actually started playing some good stuff, in a rusty kind of way, and created plenty of chances.

I know subs have to be made, particularly so early in the season, but we definitely got worse after the changes. 

Edited 2 hours ago by M_B

[...]

1 hour ago, DuffsLeftPeg said:

We only played 3 youngsters, 2 of which got minutes in the Championship last season. The rest of the team are seasoned professionals and/or recent first team signings. There are no excuses for losing, especially with a bench full of our very best players (if you can call them that!).

I’m hoping the new look team can kick on, starting with a win on Saturday which would change everything. But so far the signs aren’t looking good!

I think with adage of new players it would seem like youngsters my eyes were darting about trying to figure out who was who! Yea but you are right

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