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Saints 'B' Team


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Carabao Cup 2nd round game in a few days and  none of them look worthy of a call up for that. 

Meghoma now playing more attacking role , not sure if permanent or to accompany Larios (who looks like he'll need a lot more games to get back into it) 

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9 hours ago, JRM said:

Carabao Cup 2nd round game in a few days and  none of them look worthy of a call up for that. 

Meghoma now playing more attacking role , not sure if permanent or to accompany Larios (who looks like he'll need a lot more games to get back into it) 

Meghoma wants out, so I doubt there's any long term plan from our part. He's probably just being shunted forward to keep playing whilst Larios can get some minutes in his favoured LB slot.

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Interesting to see the shift in strategy for U21 players has been more towards picking up young players who have professional league experience like O’Brien-Whitmarsh and Akachukwu from the Irish leagues, and 3 of the deadline day signings in Buck (MLS), Macleod (Scottish Prem), and Dipepa (League 2) rather than trying to pick players from leading academies, additional all of these 3 have now played at international age group level. Also, strangely our other deadline signing Tabares from Fulham had only just signed a professional contract in July but seems we wanted him enough to prise him away. 

Players who have been competing against professional/older or more physical players, also tend to develop quicker. This change in strategy is interesting because you can see how much physicality helps increase your chances of getting into our first team. For example, although Dibling hasn’t been exposed to professional football, he does have an advanced physicality for his age. You then compare him to Sam Amo-Ameyaw who is a similar level of skill (probably a better finisher and quicker but not as good at passing which you would expect from one being mainly a winger vs primarily an eight) but definitely more slight physically. Dibling’s advanced physicality has definitely accelerated his integration into the first team and now looking to get a start whereas SAA is still looking for significant minutes in the PL but did finish very well vs Cardiff. Will be interesting to see longer term if this strategy leads to more first team players being developed from the academy - even though this strategy would require them coming in to the academy at a later age or exposing our academy players to more loans.

Hopefully the new players will embed into the U21s quickly and start to push for minutes in the PL. I think Dipepa looks particularly exciting with United having been looking at him only in May, he looked good in his clips for Port Vale (although hard to judge on YouTube videos) but a couple of really nice touches and assist in the England game today against Portugal U18. Also excited to see our academy players from the age groups come through such as Jay Robinson, Leo Rodella, and Dylan Moody - although GK is a notoriously hard position to bring through.

Despite a few obvious big losses to the big teams this summer it looks like we hopefully have a talented u21 and u18 team again this year. 

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