One of the posters on RamZone last week was asking this question of our so-called Academy and youth production line.

Well he may ask. Apart from Barnes who still has enormous potential yet to be realised, but may never well be, and Huddlestone – just who have we produced?

We had two Under 21s keepers – both perfectly placed to stake out a place in the team for the next ten if not fifteen years, now playing for other clubs and hardly distinguishing themselves.

Lee Holmes has been out on loan more often than I've had hot dinners and while his keenness and willingness to work cannot be doubted, he's never really been considered as one for the future.

Nyatanga looks like going the same way despite being a full International; Wales seems to be a country where all you have to do is stand up and kick in a straight line to be considered for selection.

Barnes is in very great danger of having a career fizzle out either through injury or over-exposure and too high expectations at a too early age. Being a match winner in a poor team (as he was last year) is not good nurturing – Rooney by contrast in his early years was in two very stable environments with several players with far more established careers than he had at his development stage. Indeed it would not surprise me if Barnes failed to develop and move on due to being ruined by the previous manager who if I recall rightly once deployed him in several roles in one match! It is hard enough for established professionals to move around roles in the same match, never mind a youngster still learning.

Huddlestone has been much more carefully nurtured and it is now a joy to watch him at times turn it on for Spurs with his incredible passing skills. One wonders if he would have been able to develop if he had stayed. I suspect not as expediency would have taken precedence over careful nurturing.

Now we have Jewell supposedly considering seriously abandoning the reserve team next year as he apparently feels the Academy players are so short on quality that either so few or none are going to make the grade.

I, for one, am seriously ticked off by this – we are a small town club with apparently excellent facilities but we are not producing any return for our investment. We should be. But we're not. Why not? What's been going on? And what does PJ propose doing about it? I can understand that he needs to focus on the first team for the immediate future but we must – repeat must – get things right at the bottom level so that we produce our own players as well as buying in. The model to emulate is Arsenal – getting the best and brightest in and then nurturing them ready for the first team – it is no accident that one of their rejects is still good enough for consideration for selection of the national England team.

Can we have some answers please? Is there any long-term planning for real sustainability of the whole club and not just for the rest of this season and the next?

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