Not sure of the exact timelines but the specificity of Ferret's "15th birthday" thing makes me think that Lukas may have still been in the Southampton academy at that point
That's right yep.
I appreciate that not many of our youth teamers have done a lot elsewhere, but I'm not willing to dismiss that as being due to 99% of them over the last 20 years being hopeless, and I still think the club has a lot to answer for.
Some clubs of an equivalent size will obviously have it a lot more difficult to get very young lads in if they're in the suburbs of Manchester or similar. We are the size of a city, with no league club within 30 miles and no Prem club within 60 miles. We will always have a reasonable area to recruit from (even if, granted, big clubs still get first pickings). And yet we hardly ever make it work.
We are good at taking young boys from the depths of non league and developing them (Charlie, Gladwin etc), we are good at taking young boys from bigger clubs and developing them (Ritchie, Luongo etc), but we are bad at developing our own.
Even Nathan barely played until he was about 21, he couldn't get a game in the Wilson / Hart days. When Paolo di Canio (who gave Nathan his chance, gave Louis his debut at 17, and also gave some of the other young lads such as Kennedy and Storey a fair few games) represents the most patient this century, it really doesn't reflect well on the club at all.
Maybe Smith is a naughty boy. But Flitcroft was raving about him in the summer - he was doing the same about Twine. Another one who is way down the ladder because he would never get a sniff of football here. Last week they interviewed the Chippenham manager on the radio after their game and asked whether Flitcroft phones him in the week to talk about Twine. The answer was basically a polite and long-winded 'no'.
This could probably justify a thread of its own, but I'm heavily involved with youth development within another sport and it's something that I will always feel pretty strongly about.