Quote ="vikings 4 ever"1st thing McCormack did was ship all of the youth players out on loan. Year after year players could have come through but the likes of Nash, Alcock, Bruce Johnson, Draper, Bowman, Keaveny, Donoghue, Sidlow were continually ignored and shipped out.
To show how far McCormack ignored the youth players, despite starting last year with loads of youngsters in the team, by the time we played Celtic away, we didn't have one home grown player in the squad and even Celtic had 1 or 2. Sure fire way to show we didn't deserve a licence being beaten for youth development by a side who were less then 3 years old and had the reputation for being a team full of Aussies - to make matter worse we were well beaten and it was on Sky - just how bad were we trying to make ourselves look?'"
I dont think Steve Mc did at all bad with the young players in the academy & reserves. He certainly gave more debuts to young players than any other Widnes coach has in a long long time and he was under a hell of a lot of pressure to succeed and gain promotion over those years which is never going to be a time in a coaches mind to blood all your young players.
I dont think it was ever a case of ignoring young players but some of them werent ready to step up to first team and play at that level consistently over the course of the season. Sadly, as I put on the previous post the fact that the standard of the reserve league is so deceiving didnt and still doesnt help either when judging the credentials of a young player.
The loan deals caught some of the young players out in all honesty so I suppose they served their purpose in that respect. Probably the biggest example for me would be Adam Bowman who should be a regular in the centres now given his previous form at reserves. He was a very very good centre at that level and outside of Richie Myler & Adam Sidlow would have been the player I fancied to crack first team rugby and become a mainstay in the side. As it was successive loan spells at Swinton didnt go too well and I dont think we ever saw a fully focused and confident player return to the club.
Just to pick up on your Celtic game point. In the first game where we went down 50-18 in May, 3 players played who came through the full system at Widnes, those being Grady, Donoghue & Draper. That was compared to the Crusaders 0.
In the league game in June, Ben Flower did play for Celtic and Widnes didnt field any players who had come through their system although Dean, Kavanagh, Crookes, Roper & Tyrer where all U'21 players.
