Year of the Youth on its way

Now those of you who know me will know that I am a soft touch when it comes to supporting the youth set up at Burnley, always have been and always will be. I’ve always thought it was the best way forward for our club and if I could help in anyway then I would be only too pleased to.

There are times when I’ve wondered whether we would ever get ourselves in gear again at youth level but I believe that is exactly what we are beginning to do. Over the last couple of years I’ve spoken to people involved, to people such as Ashley Hoskin, Andy Farrell and Vince Overson who have all been only too pleased to tell me how things are improving and what has been done to bring about this improvement, although all have warned there is a long way to go.

There’s more extensive scouting now, and there’s a far better standard of coaching and I do believe that the future is going to be considerably better than the immediate past. Vince is now Head of Youth Development, he is the man charged with creating a youth system that will provide Burnley Football Club with first team footballers. He is putting his team together right through, from Youth Team Coach Terry Pashley and Child Protection Officer Jeff Taylor, to all those involved with the Centre of Excellence.

So the answer just had to be yes, we will try and raise the £200, and that’s when the Year of the Youth campaign idea came into my head. I thought we would be somewhat disappointed if we couldn’t do a little bit better than £200. So Clarets Mad will continue to raise the profile of the youth system at Burnley, covering as many games as we can, as we have in recent seasons, and reporting on all aspects, where possible, of youth development at Turf Moor.

And we will also do our best to raise some money to help, be it £200 or whatever we can raise. This site has raised around £6,000 for Club and Trust over the past two years so I would hope that we might be able to do a little bit better than sponsoring one player.

We’ve put together a small team of volunteers to get this off the ground, members of the message board, who have already pledged to help. So look out for events and fundraising ideas during the next year, our Year of the Youth here at Clarets Mad.

Back in the early days of youth development we were without doubt the best in the country. Football has changed so much since then, and we cannot expect to find a group of international footballers all at once. We can though hopefully produce first team footballers again and here we all have a chance to help them.

We’ll be announcing details of the launch before the end of February.