City trio learnt plenty from academy spell
FIRST-TEAMERS SPENT TIME WITH YOUNGSTERS ON CROATIA TRIP
JOHN Stones, Phil Foden and Ilkay Gundogan weren’t planning on spending a week with the academy when it became clear they would not be able to travel with the first team to the United States this summer - and City’s youth coaches certainly hadn’t prepared for having them.
Pep Guardiola had made it clear he would much rather have not lost the players for a sizable chunk of pre-season, with his squad thinned by the fact they did not meet entry requirements for the US.
The message to the academy was to include the senior stars as much as possible and to make them adapt rather than tailoring to their needs, and the dialogue was constantly back and forth as the first-team coaches wanted progress reports on how they were doing.
It quickly became clear there was no need at all to worry.
If there was any potential for further awkwardness at the unusual circumstances, they quickly disappeared as the senior players left an incredible mark on the youngsters and staff during their training camp in Croatia.
“It’s not going over the top to say that the week was transformed by the presence of the first-team players,” Under-21s coach Brian Barry Murphy told M.E.N. Sport.
“If I was to speak about the week without referencing them it would be a total lie because it ended up revolving around them because of what they gave us.
“It was an incredible experience for our players and staff - and I’d like to say for them! I think it was a very beneficial week for them from a performance point of view. For us, it was amazing.”
The presence of Stones was deemed too good an opportunity for Barry-Murphy and his team to overlook. Clips of the former Everton defender both playing for
City and talking about how to fit into the Guardiola system were regularly played to the academy players last season as examples of best practice, so to have him in the flesh for a string of days was an unexpected bonus.
The defender was happy to speak to the youngsters, and accepted a request to field questions from around a dozen youngsters about life as a professional athlete at City. All three would also get a heads-up on the training sessions every day and then help get the ideas across to the players - and the coaches. “Their willingness to buy into the sessions and help me any way they could was brilliant from my point of view. It wasn’t a case of adapting the sessions, it was just taking on any ideas they had to make,” said Barry-Murphy.
“As coaches we always want to project to the players that we are experts and have all the answers but
We were hanging on Gundogan’s every word. It was a week’s education for us Brian Barry-Murphy
there were moments where Ilkay would say something to me on the pitch and it would be like a lightbulb moment where you think ‘S***, I never thought of that!’
“He was so insightful in terms of his experience in Germany, different things that he sees, different things that Pep gives to him and his interpretation of that.
“We had every position – John as a defensive unit, the strikers are obsessed with Phil and then Gundo gave us this insight into the different midfield experiences of what he has experienced and what could be useful to us as players or coaches. We were hanging off his every word, it was a week’s education.”
In the end, the only adaptation that had to be made was that the academy players could not train as often as the first-team stars because their level was so intense. The impression given by all three was that they were determined not to lose any competitive advantage to their team-mates - one source close to a first-team star suggested he may even have worked harder in Croatia than he would have done with all the commercial obligations in the US - and they also took part in a friendly game to boost their match sharpness.
Despite not being part of the club’s plans initially, it seems to have worked better than anyone could have expected. City academy coaches joked last week that it was their training camp that led to Gundogan’s impressive showing so far this season, yet the German and the others may well have had significant influence as the Under-21s have so far beaten Liverpool 3-0 and Leicester 3-1 this season.