Borini admits frustation over Chelsea youth policy
The Italian, who will be playing in the Championship playoff final at Wembley tomorrow, spoke of his frustration over the lack of opportunities for young players at Stamford Bridge:
“I don’t need to remind Chelsea what I can do because they already know – I’ve been top scorer for the reserves – and sometimes you need to be honest with yourself.
“I need to go away from Chelsea to play regular football, even if it’s with a smaller team in a smaller league.
“Most of the young players at Chelsea have had to do the same thing.
“Scott Sinclair, who plays at Swansea now, Jack Cork, Jeffrey Bruma, Patrick van Aanholt and Michael Mancienne all went through the same thing. I would not say we share the same frustration, but we all need the same honesty.
“Although I am still young, I have been at Chelsea for four years now and I feel I have wasted the last six months of my career.
“When you are young, you are not patient about anything, so every game I play now is like an explosion.
“All I am concentrating on is the Wembley final – after that, we will see what the future holds for me.”
(tribalfootball)
Last summer, the club expressed a wish to promote five young players into the first team squad and allowed the likes of Michael Ballack, Juliano Belletti, Joe Cole, Deco and Ricardo Carvalho leave Stamford Bridge, but things did not go as planned as the young players rarely got off the bench as the Blues’ form dipped dramatically mid-season and the likes of Daniel Sturridge and van Aanholt had to go out of loan to get games.
Does Borini have a point about Chelsea’s youth policy? There was an argument this season that the younger shouldn’t have played whilst the team were out-of-form, which is fair enough, but what excuse was there for leaving them out of dead rubber ties, like Marseille away and at Everton on the last day of the season?
For a young player to succeed, you would eventually have to have some degree of faith in him and there’s always an element of risk involved. They say that if they’re good enough, they’re old enough, should Chelsea show more faith in their younger stars in future?