PROJECT GRAVE
THEY got there in the end. Some clubs were dragged in by the ear, others were turfed out in the cold and some were left stuck in a halfway house. Project Brave is finally here. Shame it’s not quite brave enough. It can’t be classed as courage if you give in when there’s a gun to your head.
There’s a lot to like about the new streamlined youth set-up.
This country needs to have an elite system and to do away with the bonkers last rejig that flooded the nation with players and diluted the quality.
The bloated old pro-youth approach had 2300 kids in the system and has done nothing but give about 2150 of them a story to tell in the pub in decades to come.
You know the tale. I was on the books of X club until I fell off my bike and got injured…
We’ve already got enough of the “I could have been a contender” stories, thank you very much. We need winners.
That’s what the new set-up is aiming to achieve.
Project Brave has narrowed the field and shut the door on some clubs and there will be noses out of joint from hitting up against the glass.
The likes of Dundee United, Partick Thistle, Ross County and St Mirren are in the new middle tier created to soften the blow of missing out on the main party.
These are clubs that have a track record of success with youth but
SPORTS VIEW THURSDAY
and only half the teams in it are actually professional. It’s taking the P.
Good luck to the part-timers but they are not the ones who are going to be creating the next generation of Scotland players.
Youngsters tumble down the divisions, it’s very rare there is movement in the other direction.
We need a proper pro set-up. Fulltime teams with reserves and youth academies all linked together but leagues and strategies that benefit the game and the national side.
When Germany failed to win a corner at Euro 2000 they ripped it up and made their teams pick six homegrown players in their matchday squads in the Bundesliga.
Can you imagine Scottish clubs agreeing to that one? Jeez, our lot threw a tizz at having two Under-21 lads freezing their RS McCalls off on the bench every week for long enough.
The only way we’ll get our kids to the top level is to have them in firstteam starting line-ups from the age of 18, none of this nonsense about treating 24-year-olds as youngsters.
But that’s the Project Brave Paradox. The elite teams in the chain are the bigger clubs who attract the talent but are less likely to actually play them.
The next batch are more inclined to play them but will struggle to attract them because they are no longer classed as elite.
There is no right answer. Nations like ours can stumble across a good batch and it’s happy days. We can go on a barren run and it can be just bad luck.
But the last two decades have been nothing to do with misfortune. Time will tell if the new set-up is a winner but we have to just hope in five years we are not looking at Project Grave.