QPR’s head of youth Steve Gallen is the very entertaining guest on this week’s Open All R’s Podcast.
A superb podcast this week with Gallen in terrific form - a lot of really excellent insight and well worth listening to.
Apart from the discussion about the Gallen family Christmas, which should keep you all amused, there’s chat on QPR’s current position within the British youth structure, and what a new training ground at Warren Farm could mean for that.
Gallen is forthright and engaging on all topics and says: "A new training ground doesn’t make a player, a coach doesn’t make a player. You can’t make a bad player good, but you can affect people’s mentality. A new training ground would be lovely to work in, but the truth is it’s all about what is inside a player.
"A new training ground is needed to get us into Category One - it will mean we play against the best every single week. Celtic have to play against St Mirren, Partick Thistle, lower division teams every week, and then they have to play AC Milan and Barcelona. How do you do that? We’ve come out of a situation where we were playing Barnet, Stevenage — not knocking them, decent youth departments, good clubs — but now we’re playing Crystal Palace who have a good youth set up, and Nottingham Forest, Cardiff, Swansea and we’re being tested by better opposition. We need to be tested against better: Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham — to really test our players week in week out.”
Rangers currently have youth team graduates Max Ehmer, Tom Hitchcock, Michael Harriman, Bruno Andrade and Michael Doughty out on loan. On the difficulty of graduating young players to the QPR first team Gallen says…
"We all want to see these boys playing in the first team. It’s even more difficult because our first team is so good. The manager wants to go with the players he trusts like Yossi Benayoun, Oguchi Onyewy and Javier Chevanton, but it means Hitchcock, Ehmer and Andrade go out on loan. But they’re playing league football. We all want to see them in our first team, that’s the goal. It’s going to take a little time with the youth team, but we are moving in the right direction.”
To listen to, download or subscribe to the podcast please click here.
Tweet @QPRPodcast, @DavidEFraser, @ChrisCharles101, @PaulFinney1969, @CharlieAshcroft
Pictures — Action Images