South Africa Youth Discussion

[GM-crowfan65]

Not right to make accusations like that when last seasons side for him had 5 18yo, and that took me 5 secs to check
Plenty of teams win without stacking their side with 20yos
To win one you can say it was easy or a bit of luck but 4,5 takes more than that

[simmo014]

Current squad (for my main) is made up of the following. I try to get them young and train them up how I like them. I'm hardly stacked with 20yo. I'm happy with my meaningless titles.

16 - 3
17 - 3
18 - 4
19 - 6
20 - 7

I do like the international side of FTP and will keep trying to get the best out of Zimbabwe U20. I'm also happy when players of mine from other countries get recognised and selected.

Tsvanhu is a star and will be very important for us next season (and the next OD tour depending on form)

[boscorp]

getting back on topic, a few seasons ago we had some good involvement from the community.
Word went out to increase experience by exposing identified youth to extra senior matches with good reults. Aside from Australia and New Zealand we now have more experience in our squads than most countries. It is impressive to see the number of youth getting extra matches, there are other managers that want to get involved we just have to identify and include them somehow.
We have some awfully good managers who keep mainly to themselves but keep producing good talent from both scouting and training. I can think of about 8 clubs successful clubs that with some prompting could get SA successful. communication and disagreements are the biggest hurdle atm. 3 managers cannot carry the squad but with some discussion and direction we can continue move forward.

[werdo64]

Not right to make accusations like that when last seasons side for him had 5 18yo, and that took me 5 secs to check
Plenty of teams win without stacking their side with 20yos
To win one you can say it was easy or a bit of luck but 4,5 takes more than that

With "you" I meant managers in general.

Some of us, like yourself, make the effort to have a constant production of players at each age group, but it is too easy to cut a senior team and academy completely to have all that spare cash to buy gun youths to win league titles with.

The exact same goes for seniors that have no youth team or academy, even though the savings here are quite a bit less than with seniors.

But sure, if you have a bunch of 18 and 19yos and can manage to win, take some pride in that. I just don't think many will notice it.

I don't think that is fair to say that a team that is only interested in youths is playing the "easy" game by ignoring seniors.
Personally I find Mondays the most exciting FTP day of the week because of Youth Training and Youth pull. Youths just pop so much quicker and so you feel like you are making so much more progress than seniors.
I also prefer to HomeGrow a team, entirely from my own youth pulls. I haven't bought a single player, and I don't intend to buy any. It's a very long term strategy, such that my seniors are just getting to 150k ratings (but the oldest are 24, and all their power is very low still). I can see that some think this isn't the way to win anything, but I really enjoy it, and get attached to these players that I've invested all this time into.

That aside, I can see that a bunch of players in our current crop of 16YO's are being trained well already. They are at Ord/Ave/Reas fielding, and are still being trained. We even have one of our potential NAT's whose already at Capable fielding.
There are others who are having their fielding ignored to chase primaries. We'll chat with those managers and see if we can change some opinions.