Made in Walsall, stars for Saddlers

Walsall blogger Mark Jones can see the club's youth policy reaping more dividends as a new crop of Saddlers starlets start to come to the first-team fore.

A 6-1 win away at Tranmere, with the first five going in within half an hour, I think most of us would settle for that.

Unfortunately this is probably not a vision of the near future, but it's the latest highly impressive result from the highly impressive Walsall youth team.

A perfect seven wins out of seven, with shedloads of goals flying in too, represents a tidy start for Neil Woods as head of youth.

On top of that, George Bowerman scored all four goals for the reserves in the 4-1 win at Tividale in the Birmingham Senior Cup on Tuesday showing that, below first-team level at least, things aren't looking too bad.

Traditionally, the club has always been able to bring through good young players. From Bert Williams through to Allan Clarke, David Preece and David Kelly, Stuart Ryder and Michael Ricketts to Matty Fryatt and Scott Dann, among hundreds of others, the club has a proud record.

I thought it would be hard to replace Mick Halsall after the superb job he did for over a decade, but it would appear that his two successors have made a good fist of carrying on where he left off.

Of course, the real proof of just how good a job Woods is doing probably won't be seen for a couple of years when the current crop of kids start to challenge for a first team place.

Ironically, it's manager Dean Smith who could possibly be reaping the rewards of his own work with the Youth team, or not as the case may be.

We all know that the route from 'promising youngster' to 'proper footballer' is full of all kinds of obstacles.

Think about the journey that Alex Nicholls has taken from looking likely to fill Fryatt's boots in the last days of the Merson era to the player terrorising Preston's defence last weekend, with everything that's gone in between.

But what isn't helping 'Deano' this season is the ridiculously idiotic and short-sighted decision to scrap the reserve team last year. Without wishing to point the finger, thanks a lot Chris Hutchings.

Jamie Paterson and George Bowerman are the two most obvious examples of emerging talent who were left high and dry last season, with not enough matches of a decent quality to develop their game. Effectively, they have missed a year.

Similarly, Richard Taundry, Darryl Westlake, Manny Smith and Oliver Lancashire are all young players who could have done with somewhere to go to find some form when they were struggling last year.

This year, we have got that option and, over the course of the season, I think we will see the benefits. Now, probably more than ever, we need to continue producing our own.

We have funding that is limited, to say the least, no-one really knows what the future holds for the ownership of club or freehold - apart from one person- and our league is as competitive as ever.

How badly we will be affected by the latest Premier League proposals for a four-tier academy system, which to me seem to pretty much allow the greedies to cherry pick whoever they want remains to be seen.

Depressingly, the Football League clubs have now voted in favour of this, probably under duress given the threat of withdrawal of Premier League funding and a couple of Chinese burns.

However, I still think there are good reasons to put our faith in the youth system.

Roll on the day we can put out a team that is made in Walsall.