Dons youth

[Jute]

Sadly lost 3-1.

[Jute]

Findlay Marshall with another goal for Arbroath tonight. Wonder if we have managed to get a contract offer in front of him. 

[Jute]

Forgot to say Dons U18s lost to Queen’s Park last Friday 2-0. Queens Park will face Hearts in youth cup final. 

[Ajja]

1 hour ago, Jute said:

Findlay Marshall with another goal for Arbroath tonight. Wonder if we have managed to get a contract offer in front of him. 

Is that 8 days n 24 games? Decent return for a midfielder. Do we think he’d handle the step down if he extended?

[Bukta Bertie]

8 hours ago, Jute said:

Findlay Marshall with another goal for Arbroath tonight. Wonder if we have managed to get a contract offer in front of him. 

Levels. 

[Jute]

53 minutes ago, Bukta Bertie said:

Levels. 

Definitely a lower level but having 10 goals in championship and being talked about as one best players in that league at 19 we should be seeing if he capable of stepping up.
 

At a minimum we need to ensure an offer is made to ensure we get compensation if he leaves in the summer. 

[Jute]

Alfie Stewart been told his contract won’t be being renewed in the summer according to P&J. Seemed to be doing well at Inverness and well thought of by their fans. 

[manc_don]

I noticed they said bavidge had already been told. Did we know that? He I understand, Stewart, didn’t really know enough about. 

[Jute]

56 minutes ago, manc_don said:

I noticed they said bavidge had already been told. Did we know that? He I understand, Stewart, didn’t really know enough about. 

Yeah was reported in P&J a couple of weeks ago that he had been told to go.

[TheDonbytheDee]

Alfie Stewart getting good reviews this season as well.

Scored a cracker on Saturday too.

You'd think he must be worth a chance

Not much more he could do.

[Ajja]

There was a pretty interesting post on P&B by a Motherwell fan about Robinson approach to youth. Worth a read in terms of what he did at them with quite a few emerging youngsters there at the time. Not necessarily a firm guide to what he will do with us but interesting insight nonetheless. I’ll dig out a link 

[Ajja]

3 minutes ago, Ajja said:

There was a pretty interesting post on P&B by a Motherwell fan about Robinson approach to youth. Worth a read in terms of what he did at them with quite a few emerging youngsters there at the time. Not necessarily a firm guide to what he will do with us but interesting insight nonetheless. I’ll dig out a link 

Here’s a dump of the post;

I can't really speak to what he did/didn't do at St Mirren other than what I've seen from the outside looking in (ie: Mooney barely getting a look in but still getting picked up by Arsenal, Taylor getting bounced about the lower leagues etc) but his time at Motherwell has a bit of nuance on that score.

The long and the short of it is, he absolutely played players from the Academy. He's not wrong in saying that. It's factually correct.

The likes of Chris Cadden, David Turnbull, Allan Campbell, Jake Hastie (eventually after two loans), and James Scott all got regular games under Robinson (and some made us a lot of money - Cadden excepted who snaked off to MLS when we would have been due a development fee). However Cadden was given his debut by McCall, Campbell and Hastie got their debuts from McGhee. There's a school of thought from pretty much anyone who was watching the Development League that David Turnbull could have been in our first team 6 months before he actually started getting games (except Robinson insisted he had to learn to do the "free stuff" better).

So, yes, players from the Academy got games under Robinson (moreso than his time at St Mirren I'd say) but a lot of these were players who were broadly speaking already around the first team.

I've said it before but there is absolutely zero chance that we'd have seen Lennon Miller in our first team at 16 (or subsequently captaining the side) had Robinson been our manager at that point.

I mean, he deserves credit for the breakout season we got from David Turnbull but also...David Turnbull was a generational player for us. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.

We had players like Stuart McKinstry (who moved to Leeds) and Reece McAlear (who moved to Norwich) that never kicked a ball for our first team in competitive games but only started to appear on the fringes of our team when it became clear that Premier League clubs were interested and we were making a 'too little, too late' attempt to show that there was a pathway under Robinson.

There's also a laundry list of Academy players that he simply binned off. Barry Maguire actually played more games for Graham Alexander than he did for Robinson. He signed Deimantas Petravičius and had him in the Scottish Cup final squad ahead of someone like Ross Maclean, he released/sold Jack McMillan in his first full season as manager, he released Alfie Agyeman. We "sold" Dom Thomas to Killie for a sell-on basically because Thomas didn't think he'd get an opportunity.

Then you've got someone like David Ferguson whose career was pretty much ended by the chasing he got from Jordan Jones at Fir Park against Killie.

There are a litany of players from our Academy who maybe got 1 or 2 appearances under Robinson but were simply disappeared at the end of their contracts.

I'm not sure what that actually means for Aberdeen, if anything.

Ultimately some of those Academy players may not actually have been good enough and he was right to release them but if "Developing Youth" is actually a KPI that he's going to be judged on then I'll be interested to see how he actually aligns this because based on the fact that it's *Aberdeen* (and he's already spoken about the resources he has available now) I'm not sure that his approach of filling a squad with cheap dross that unintentionally ends up blocking the pathway for Youth is actually going to fly and on the flip of that he's the sort of manager who would (IMO) always favour an established Pro ahead of giving an Academy player a run.

I dunno, I guess there are maybe parallels between McInnes stumbling onto McKenna after we'd leathered them in a Cup game and how Robinson approached "bringing youngsters through".

[RicoS321]

2 hours ago, Ajja said:

Here’s a dump of the post;

 

I can't really speak to what he did/didn't do at St Mirren other than what I've seen from the outside looking in (ie: Mooney barely getting a look in but still getting picked up by Arsenal, Taylor getting bounced about the lower leagues etc) but his time at Motherwell has a bit of nuance on that score.

The long and the short of it is, he absolutely played players from the Academy. He's not wrong in saying that. It's factually correct.

The likes of Chris Cadden, David Turnbull, Allan Campbell, Jake Hastie (eventually after two loans), and James Scott all got regular games under Robinson (and some made us a lot of money - Cadden excepted who snaked off to MLS when we would have been due a development fee). However Cadden was given his debut by McCall, Campbell and Hastie got their debuts from McGhee. There's a school of thought from pretty much anyone who was watching the Development League that David Turnbull could have been in our first team 6 months before he actually started getting games (except Robinson insisted he had to learn to do the "free stuff" better).

So, yes, players from the Academy got games under Robinson (moreso than his time at St Mirren I'd say) but a lot of these were players who were broadly speaking already around the first team.

I've said it before but there is absolutely zero chance that we'd have seen Lennon Miller in our first team at 16 (or subsequently captaining the side) had Robinson been our manager at that point.

I mean, he deserves credit for the breakout season we got from David Turnbull but also...David Turnbull was a generational player for us. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth.

We had players like Stuart McKinstry (who moved to Leeds) and Reece McAlear (who moved to Norwich) that never kicked a ball for our first team in competitive games but only started to appear on the fringes of our team when it became clear that Premier League clubs were interested and we were making a 'too little, too late' attempt to show that there was a pathway under Robinson.

There's also a laundry list of Academy players that he simply binned off. Barry Maguire actually played more games for Graham Alexander than he did for Robinson. He signed Deimantas Petravičius and had him in the Scottish Cup final squad ahead of someone like Ross Maclean, he released/sold Jack McMillan in his first full season as manager, he released Alfie Agyeman. We "sold" Dom Thomas to Killie for a sell-on basically because Thomas didn't think he'd get an opportunity.

Then you've got someone like David Ferguson whose career was pretty much ended by the chasing he got from Jordan Jones at Fir Park against Killie.

There are a litany of players from our Academy who maybe got 1 or 2 appearances under Robinson but were simply disappeared at the end of their contracts.

I'm not sure what that actually means for Aberdeen, if anything.

Ultimately some of those Academy players may not actually have been good enough and he was right to release them but if "Developing Youth" is actually a KPI that he's going to be judged on then I'll be interested to see how he actually aligns this because based on the fact that it's *Aberdeen* (and he's already spoken about the resources he has available now) I'm not sure that his approach of filling a squad with cheap dross that unintentionally ends up blocking the pathway for Youth is actually going to fly and on the flip of that he's the sort of manager who would (IMO) always favour an established Pro ahead of giving an Academy player a run.

I dunno, I guess there are maybe parallels between McInnes stumbling onto McKenna after we'd leathered them in a Cup game and how Robinson approached "bringing youngsters through".

Aye, it's the McInnes approach, basically. Which is actually the approach of most Scottish managers. I've been saying for years that we need to enforce quotas if we're to get any value from the youth system. There really is no benefit to a manager from letting a youth player make errors in the first team. Not compared to winning games with a few athletes.