Cowley’s keen to hand challenge to prospects
TOWN manager Danny Cowley has explained the thinking that goes into deciding the right time and place for young players out on loan to gain experience of senior football.
Several youngsters who have come through that system already have made appearances for Town so far this season, including Rarmani Edmonds-Green (now on loan at Swindon Town), Kian Harratt (on loan at Harrogate Town).
But while that pair have made temporary switches down to the lower divisions, Cowley believes there is no one-size-fits-all approach to choosing when and where to send players out on loan.
He said: “They’re all good young players. They all develop through a good training and a good games programme.
“We also as a football club need a training group to make sure that training is competitive, we need competition for places, so it’s a balance between the two.
“For me, for any young player they need to being playing between 20 and 30 games. With really good training and 30 games I think in those younger years it can be a really nice balance and that’s what we’re trying to achieve for all of them,
They’re all good young players. They all develop through a good games
programme
that’s the ideal. Obviously football is a team game and there are other dynamics but certainly our aim and our culture is always a player-centred one so we try to do the right thing by each individual.
“There’s a possibility that one, maybe two of those younger players could go out on loan before the end of the window but it’s also about what type of loans and getting them to the right loans.
“Someone like Matt Daly, we know that we’ve got to set them up for success, so if I send him to a club that play back to front quickly on a difficult surface, the chances of him being successful on that loan are going to be limited.
“We’ve got to try to find the right club with the right manager that plays in a style that will get the best out of Matt, and if we can’t do that we’ll make a decision to keep Matt with us and keep trying to progress him in our building.
“I think young players are all individuals, aren’t they, and you just look at their progress. The young ones that are making day to day progress and you can see they’re on a real upward curve, you don’t kind of want to take them off that upward curve because you can see them daily making the progress you want them to.
“It’s when they start to plateau – which can happen if they don’t play enough games – when that happens you’ve got to try to feel that and read that as a manager and then that tends to be a good time to loan those players out.”