Lrrr

Yes its normal

Cook admissions about Essex, spirit of the game…..?

Because they wanted to, it is pretty irrelevant as the club can’t do anything about it…. Except of course actually telling fans in a timely manner that it would be a 12:30 kick off

Team whose losing will naturally have more of the ball unless they’re playing someone like Man City who can cope with the pressure on the ball a team whose losing will put on it

If they’re blaming the pitch then they’re as deluded as the guy on talk sport, Ashton Gate’s pitch is fine and better then a lot in the championship

Or he’s had to try and keep his right foot planted and reach because the pass was behind him, if you watch his feet as he moves

Not a fan of Twine off the wing, however you could tuck him into a number 10 type role there and have Pring push on and build up with a back 3

And yet its what they've done to the EFL trophy

I mean it as in we wouldn’t loan anyone out at all, no loans to anyone to aid player development as we would need to retain a full strength team for our u21 side if we were cat 1 to make sure games were competitive otherwise we would be on the end of heavy defeats regularly with players not developing as well as they could.

The reason why City aren't a Cat 1 is frankly because we don't want to be, with the building of the new training ground if we had serious plans to be Cat 1 we'd have ticked every box doing it. We feel we produce enough players the way we do. As you allude to the category of a club is only defined by facilities, staff numbers and the amount of training provided as a minimum, there's nothing to say a club with a lower category can't have all of it but just choose to be a lower category. For us we've said before being Cat 1 would mean all of our academy players having to stay in house to be competitive rather than letting players go out on loans in senior football to the likes of Yate/Bath/Yeovil which we see as the route which better helps players develop rather than being around at 20/21 still playing academy football, we also believe in pushing younger players up asap when ready, something else that could be blocked if older players were kept around just to be competitive if they had no real future at first team level.

Never take any guesses like that on youth football, cat 1 clubs can often struggle against Cat 2 & 3 when they choose to press them high and aggressively, you often see them fall because they don’t yet have the clam head and ability to play out under the pressure like they’re instructed to. Cat 1 football is almost like a different sport to Cat 2 & 3

I’d say 19/20 season would have had a stronger squad. Conway, Bell, Pearson, Low, Towler etc Benarous only on the bench.

May as well rename it sky sports West Brom for the period

Would prefer to put the pressure taker at 4 usually, you don't want to gamble on 5 not taking a penalty, it happened to Salah before being stuck at 5. a 3-0 rarely happens so you don't need to worry about number 3 as much.

It could be a hard one to be overly critical for us on, probably just like a week or two trial where he maybe got to play a couple of games & train a handful of times. We'd have only taken him in if he was significantly better then what we had in house at the time and perhaps he just didn't have a good week.

Nice little 5 day break in Abu Dhabi with no training for most players, get the golf clubs out lads

Featured last week for the 21's, won't be involved tonight due to playing Wednesday as its a Youth Cup game.

And there’s a glare from the sun so the top part of the screen is the palm of someone’s hand for the dolman salute

BBC just stick non league players in any position and normally just put 442 for shape. Shows the level of interest.

I expect we were going to be happy to let Pearson's deal run down and expire but I think Pearson probably did something which made his position untenable as to why we changed when we did, I expect something like 'give me a new contract now or you can **** yourselves', Pearson had been very vocal about wanting a new deal and we probably had no intention if giving it so Pearson probably thought why waste my time for several months with nothing to work towards for him, even if we went up I doubt he'd have got a new deal.

I wouldn't say 'duty of care' as such no, the closest thing I would say would kind of be the opposite asking the club if a player could play for our U21's to make sure they're still getting minutes for their development if they're not in the first team there. Even then its a negotiation as they'll never play on a Monday if there's a Tuesday game sort of thing. In the scenario described before if Bird felt he had a knock and Derby were being dicks about it I expect either he'd report back to the HPC and see our medical department for an evaluation or we'd send a physio to him. I struggle to see it happening though because Derby wouldn't want the reputation for any future loan they may try to bring in, all it needs is for someone at City to have played with them and a bad word to get out.

They would still drop in for the youth cup, it’s the biggest thing for any academy, even more so then finishing top 2 and getting a play off spot in cat 2

Actually statistically Max is a more then fair Championship keeper & ranks in the top half

90 mph as well, will be interesting seeing him in England

Perhaps with Tottenham to play they’ll make an exception with the quality facilities/pitch etc they’ll have. With u21’s you just don’t want to send them long distance to play on some substandard pitch which may increase risk of injury again.