James Whittaker
It’s extremely encouraging to see two talented young players like Tre Ming and Zeiko Lewis getting the opportunity to go and train with English Premier League side’s Portsmouth and Fulham. Too often we’ve waited till a player is in his 20s to try and get them into a professional environment overseas. The harsh facts are that players like Stevie Astwood, Kwame Steede and Damon Ming have bags of talent but are simply too old for any club to take a chance on them. Any Academy coach will tell you that once a player is older than 16 their chances of being taken on by a professional club reduce dramatically. So it makes sense to be sending our best 14 and 15-year-olds to overseas Academies. A couple more players, like Reggie Lambe at Ipswich, getting experience in the right environment would be great for them and great for Bermudian football.
It’s extremely encouraging to see two talented young players like Tre Ming and Zeiko Lewis getting the opportunity to go and train with English Premier League side’s Portsmouth and Fulham. Too often we’ve waited till a player is in his 20s to try and get them into a professional environment overseas. The harsh facts are that players like Stevie Astwood, Kwame Steede and Damon Ming have bags of talent but are simply too old for any club to take a chance on them. Any Academy coach will tell you that once a player is older than 16 their chances of being taken on by a professional club reduce dramatically. So it makes sense to be sending our best 14 and 15-year-olds to overseas Academies. A couple more players, like Reggie Lambe at Ipswich, getting experience in the right environment would be great for them and great for Bermudian football.
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