Melbourne City Youth manager Joe Palatsides beamed with pride as he spoke about the youthful make-up of the senior side throughout the start of the A-League season.
The development coach spoke at length about the wealth of players who came through his National Youth League side last year that’ve been afforded opportunities with the first team this season.
Wade Dekker, Matt Millar, Stefan Zinni and Hernan Espindola have all made their senior bows this year and were all a part of the NYL set-up last season, while Steve Kuzmanovski and Ali Eyigun – who have also featured for the seniors – were with the team throughout their NPL 1 campaign.
Stefan Mauk – who appeared six times for City last year – and Dekker in particular have seen plenty of game time and have impressed in spades, with Palatsides particularly happy seeing the latter score his first goal for the seniors.
“It’s very rewarding, I’m like a proud father with most of them,” the Youth coach said after his side’s 1-1 draw with Perth Glory on Saturday.
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“Seeing Wade Dekker play the first game of the season, him scoring, I don’t think I’ve yelled for a goal in such a long time. When you look at the next batch coming through for this year – and we’ve seen Stefan [Mauk] have a taste of it, Ali [Eyigun] is going to be involved for the most part, as is Matt Millar, Jordy Hall.
“It’s an exciting time for this football club and we take a lot of credit, but it’s also the senior coaches who deserve the credit. They’re the ones who are determined to give them the opportunity to shine on the big stage.”
While Palatsides has been pleased to see those names making such a heavy impact on the senior landscape at City, he admits there is still work to be done to shape them into players capable of performing consistently across the full 90 minutes.
“Stefan [Zinni] is another one of our really good young players, so it Matt [Millar], Jordy [Hall], Ali Eyigun, and those [others] that have tasted first football this year,” he said.
“They all had good moments in the game [on Saturday] but my challenge is to help make those consistent 90 minute performances rather than the patches that we saw.
“They’re very exciting to watch and in moments they can turn the contest at the drop of a hat. But we need to get more consistency in all these young boys to make sure they can help John van ’t Schip in the year ahead.”
The step forward in their development is for those ‘senior’ youths to begin to control contests for the reserve side according to Palatsides, something that he believes they aren’t doing on a consistent basis just yet.
“When we go out, we always want to win and we’ve said it a lot of times, it’s about developing these young players and we’ve been fortunate in the way that a lot of young players have experienced first team football this year.
“It’s been a great result. Having tasted senior football, we really want them to dominate youth games. We were patchy for much of the game, we controlled it in some parts but others we fell apart and lost a bit of concentration.
“It’s those patches we need to get right but when we do, I’ll say we’re satisfied. Up until then, we’ve got a bit of work to do.”