Lrrr

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.

Less convinced by that one

Certainly some managerial changes have made the bottom of League 2 exciting, Cotts at FGR, Cowley's at Colchester, Robinson at Salford, Artell at Grimsby

Was exactly my reaction, vegan pies being thrown everywhere Are we moving on to 'job for LJ?'

Weird how Bashir gets approved the day before the first test, as if we’d applied a couple of days earlier he’d have been able to fly with everyone

All you have to do is play it before a certain date, you don’t get told what day you have to play it also the original date was scheduled for the training ground too

Its a piss take as the squad was announced ages ago, how far back do you have to go through someones bloodline before its okay to have had a relative from Pakistan to get a visa without issue for India...

The main part that isn't good enough is that the game is being played at the training ground rather than at Ashton Gate, the whole point of the youth cup was that young players got to experience stadium environments and we're taking that away from our young players, its supposed to be the main event of the under 18's season.

May not have been on the OS but I'd guess more people would see it on social media and the academy account put something out yesterday that was retweeted by the main account

They really didn’t learn their lesson with vegas and the time of year it was

So at 19 turning 20 he gets to have one pre season before gets written off…. Great to know