forevertufc wrote:Hadn't meant to suggest Levi Ives was a gamble, I was more referring to young players from 8-18 in general.
I did not mean to offend but I am confident in my ability to spot young talent and have given a lot of players a chance in the Western League and Conference. If you can remember a manager that Torquay Reserves had, somebody Compton did a good job for Torquay with several youngsters in an excellent young side. One player made the Premiership a centre half, can't name him I'd get it wrong.
What I am concerned about is why pay a player that is not going to progress in the club and we are going to lose him for peanuts.
A reputation counts for nothing unless the club is progressing. I've said my piece and maybe to much.
Hey, never worry about saying to much, football is a game steeped in opinions, and this being a football related forum it's just the place to express them, it's doesn't mean any of us are right or wrong doing so.
In no way am I disagreeing with on Levi Ives, saw him v Aldershot, and thought he was excellent, unfortunately Ives wasn't available for the next game, Cruise came back in, and like Downes is a part of the best defence currently in the league, so like Pearce, Ives is going to have to be patient, but also he's just 17 there's no rush, his time will come.
Yes, your right, I, we all want to see our club progressing, but it's difficult, unless we become a very rich mans play thing then losing our best young players to bigger clubs is the nature of the beast, our club now has everything in place to be a successful League 2 club, League 1 shouldn't be seen as a pipe dream either, but I just wonder what direction we're being steered in, we've gone from getting beat week in and out, to playing part time team where you don't always have play at your best to get a result, I fear the conference might be seen as a comfort zone.
I've been critical of the club over the last 18 months and rightly so, but we find ourselves in the conference and have deal with that, I think the club has it's model about right for where we find ourselves now, bringing players up from the youth set up, and bringing in raw young players with potential, like Young, O'Archie, Richards in the hope they develop and are sold on, is now are only way forward, my only hope is the club sells at the right level and reinvests in the team, that way two good players out could lead to three like replacements, then the club will progress automatically.
Rjc70 wrote:Paul Compton.
Darren Moore, Garry Monk, Mike Williamson or Wayne Thomas, possibly, arcadia?
Yes it was Darren I can remember managing against Torquay in about 1990 and Torquay Reserves had
a good very young side the keeper ended up in the first team as well. My side was at the top with Torquay but Compton had a good side. Thanks it does bring back good times.
Any player that is playing well and scoring goals will be the subject of made-up filler pieces. As well as Luke Young is doing, it was only 14 games ago that he was released by a mid-table League Two side. Obviously that looks like a huge mistake, but League One would be a decent target for him within his two year deal here. An immediate move to a team spending millions and millions and looking for promotion (both Bristol City and Cardiff have spent millions this summer looking for a quick promotion) is unrealistic.
I really hope that Ives signs a professional deal soon. If he does that we can put him in the first team without fear of developing him for another team to pounce. Without the protection of a pro deal then we can't rely on him being here long term to plan ahead.
Many years ago we sustained a Div 3 (League One) team for a number of years, and even challenging for promotion to the second tier. No reason why we shouldn't do the same again, as other clubs have done (Yeovil, Peterborough, Bournemouth, Oxford) but to do so we need to retain, as far as possible, our best players.
Scorer is quite correct. For proof of what happens when you develop then sell endless talent, have a look no further than Crewe. Their list of young hotshots is enormous. They're, in reality, a midtable L2 side.
That's the nature of clubs at our level and of 1 or 2 year contracts. If we had signed Young for a transfer fee and tied him to a 5 year deal, then we could keep him. As it is, he has a 24 month contract, during which time we have to offer him a new contract, let it expire or sell him. Clubs at our level have 10 players out of contract every summer - and largely speaking, the best of these move upwards, the average ones stay and the worst ones get released. We will shortly have Ives, Pearce and Cameron out of contract and may want to keep them, but more than likely they will all receive bigger offers and look to move on.
Looking at Crewe as an example, some players outgrow the clubs they start their careers at, and this is what the transfer market is for. Lee Sharpe would have been wasted playing on our left wing when he was starting for Man Utd as a teenager. If you want to buy raw players and develop them, then you have to sell them when the time is right. Crewe wouldn't be a Premiership club now even if they had kept Platt, Murphy, Ashton and all the others, but selling them allows them to fund the £500k a year it costs to run their academy.
The longest we can currently keep Luke Young for is another 18 months. The other promising guys like Richards, Ajala, Cameron, MacDonald and Pearce etc have at best the same remaining and in a few cases, even less. No-one is contracted past June 2016, and if these players perform well for us then they will attract bigger clubs and bigger offers. The benefit of that for us is that they can help us to promotion before moving on, and leave the Club in a far better state than it was when they arrived. At our level things are cyclical, and every summer is important to build a squad. We benefit from this when we have underperforming players, and release them into unemployment as soon as we possibly can, that is why we offer one and two year deals.
If Ives, Young or anyone else attracts suitors from higher divisions then they will go. We can't magically keep them for the next five years while we look to make League One. The only say we have in that is exactly when they go, and how much we bring in for them. We should be looking to maximise the transfer revenue we can generate from the successes, to give the manager as competitive a budget as we can to compete in whatever division we're in. The only way we will ever sustain League One football is to develop an infrastructure that will allow us to compete there, which means building it up one step at a time. Three or four good players contracted for another 18 months won't help us in the long term unless we use them to build a system that can be repeated and sustained after they've left.
You can't blame the players for this, it is how the system works. They are one bad injury away from having no income in 8 months time, and one transfer away from possibly doubling or trebling their salaries. The only players who dream of playing for Torquay United are the ones who know they won't make it any higher. These players can be Club Legends like Kevin Hill, or play in very successful sides like Matt Hockley, but you have to surround them by an Alex Russell, Eunan O'Kane or Luke Young to bring success, and those players won't stay here just to wait to see if we can make League One. If that was how the job market worked then everyone would be a paper boy and there would be no doctors.
You're quite right. With our small fan base, we're stuck with finding or developing talented players which we sell on in order for the club to survive, and if we have ambitions for higher league status, that can only be achieved by a gradual process, so that we eventually find ourselves in a sufficiently viable financial position to be able to retain those talented players. Footballing miracles don't happen overnight..
Paul Sturrock and another chap were sat behind us in the bench on Saturday...I assume Sturrock is scouting for someone nowadays?
Good to see him looking very well.
