Skip to main content

Liverpool’s trio of young strikers seek elusive breakthrough

LONDON: Around the time 17-year-old England striker Rhian Brewster became the first player since Pele to score a hat-trick in a semi-final at any World Cup on Wednesday, another gifted Liverpool attacker signed a new five-year contract.
At 18, Wales international Ben Woodburn is six months Brewster’s senior but two years younger than Dominic Solanke, the third of Liverpool’s trio of young forwards who have all made an impact on the international stage as they await their chance under manager Juergen Klopp.Earlier this season, Woodburn even scored a goal in a senior World Cup match, netting on his debut in the 1-0 victory over Austria in a vital qualifier, while Solanke won the Golden Boy award as the best player at the Under-20 World Cup, which England won.
Meanwhile, Brewster awaits what could be his crowning moment in Saturday’s final against Spain.
“Brewster will walk back into Liverpool’s Melwood training ground feeling a million dollars,” said Jamie Redknapp, a former Liverpool midfielder and England Under-21 captain who helped his side win the prestigious Toulon tournament in 1994.
“Now it is important Brewster keeps a level head. He and his England team mates are entering a crucial stage of their development. Far too often, English clubs give players aged 16 to 19 ridiculous contracts that they have not earned,” he wrote in the Daily Mail newspaper.
No details are available of the size of Woodburn’s new deal but British media reported Solanke signed a contract worth 20,000 pounds ($26,458) per week in the year after, like Brewster at a younger age, moving from Chelsea.
Both believe their chances of breaking into the first team are better at Liverpool, although their battle appears to be just beginning.
Award-winning author Michael Calvin has specialised at tracking progress from academies to the professional ranks and says the odds are heavily stacked against any youngster.
“Only 180 of the 1.5 million boys who play organised youth football will play one minute in the Premier League — that is a success rate of 0.0012 percent,” he told Reuters.
“And it can get worse. Arsene Wenger told me that 67 percent of boys who get a professional contract are out of the game by 21. Of those, one or two will leave as millionaires without kicking a ball in first-team football.”
STOCKPILING
The problem remains the stockpiling of resources by the big clubs, with the best young talents getting experience in short bursts.
That is Solanke’s current role at Liverpool: he has played a total of 93 minutes in seven appearances off the bench this season plus a full 90 in the League Cup loss at Leicester.
Woodburn has appeared more for Wales than Liverpool, for whom he has managed a solitary half against Leicester this season after making his senior debut last November. At 17, he became the club’s youngest ever goalscorer, beating Michael Owen’s record by 98 days.
Although Woodburn has only played Under-23 football this season, captaining Liverpool in the Uefa Youth League, he remains hopeful of getting his chance soon.
“I feel like at this club, there is a pathway to the first team and you get given chances here,” he said this week. “I want to show what I can do.”
Behind Woodburn, Brewster also presses against the first-team window and was named on the bench for the Premier League clash with Crystal Palace at Anfield last season. He then played in a friendly against Sydney FC in Australia.
Like Woodburn, he has been fast-tracked into the Under-23 team and is part of a genuinely talented age group with England.
Yet of his peer group, only Angel Gomes has Premier League experience, playing two minutes for Manchester United on the final day of last season.
Redknapp does not expect that rather bleak picture to change any day soon. “We are only nine games into this campaign and already three managers — Frank de Boer, Craig Shakespeare and Ronald Koeman — have been sacked. With results and survival paramount, little wonder so few managers are prepared to give youngsters a chance,” he said.
Solanke, Woodburn and Brewster all appear to have their work cut out.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

US trio win Nobel for finding Einstein’s gravitational waves

STOCKHOLM/LONDON:  Three US scientists won the 2017 Nobel prize for physics on Tuesday for opening up a new era of astronomy by detecting gravitational waves, ripples in space and time foreseen by Albert Einstein a century ago. The work of Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne crowned half a century of experimental efforts by scientists and engineers.Measuring gravitational waves offers a new way to observe the cosmos, helping scientists explore the nature of mysterious objects including black holes and neutron stars. It may also provide insight into the universe’s very earliest moments. The first detection of the waves created a scientific sensation when it was announced early last year and the teams involved in the discovery had been widely seen as favourites for Tuesday’s prize. “We now witness the dawn of a new field: gravitational wave astronomy,” Nils Martensson, acting chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physics, told reporters. “This will teach us about the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Liquid cats, crocodile bets and didgeridoos win Ig Nobel science prizes

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS:  Scientists taking on the deep questions of whether cats are liquid or solid, how holding a crocodile influences gambling and whether playing the didgeridoo can help cure snoring were honored Thursday at the Ig Nobel Prize spoof awards. The prizes are the brainchild of Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, and are intended not to honor the best or worst in science, but rather to highlight research that encourages people to think in unusual ways. “We hope that this will get people back into the habits they probably had when they were kids of paying attention to odd things and holding out for a moment and deciding whether they are good or bad only after they have a chance to think,” Abrahams said in a phone interview. Some of the honorees tend towards the spurious: French researcher Marc-Antoine Fardin’s 2014 study “Can a Cat Be Both a Solid and a Liquid?” was inspired by internet photos of cats tucked into glasses, buckets...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mexicans dig through collapsed buildings as quake kills 217

MEXICO CITY:  Police, firefighters and ordinary Mexicans dug frantically through the rubble of collapsed schools, homes and apartment buildings early Wednesday, looking for survivors of Mexico’s deadliest earthquake in decades as the number of confirmed fatalities stood at 217. Adding poignancy and a touch of the surreal, Tuesday’s magnitude-7.1 quake struck on the 32nd anniversary of the 1985 earthquake that killed thousands. Just hours earlier, people around Mexico had held earthquake drills to mark the date. One of the most desperate rescue efforts was at a primary and secondary school in southern Mexico City, where a wing of the three-story building collapsed into a massive pancake of concrete slabs. Journalists saw rescuers pull at least two small bodies from the rubble, covered in sheets. Volunteer rescue worker Dr. Pedro Serrano managed to crawl into the crevices of the tottering pile of rubble that had been Escuela Enrique Rebsamen. He made it into a classroom...
Post a Comment
Read more