Five wins in a row would please most coaches- especially with a 10 point lead at the top of the table.
Stevie Frail should be happy but as he weighs up Celtic’s displays in the first season of the u-20 league he has to wrestle with a number of issues.
Every Celtic team is expected to win and on that front the u-20 side can’t be faulted with 13 wins out of 17 so far this season and a quarter-final clash in the SFA Youth Cup with Aberdeen looming next Sunday.
Developing academy prospects into first team players is the hardest part of the u-20 remit but at Inverness last weekend Marcus Fraser and Dylan McGeouch were perfectly at home and earned the praise of Neil Lennon.
The sudden change from u-19 football to u-20, with clubs able to field overage players, has changed the environment that Celtic are playing in with the hoops, with very few exceptions, using the league to accelerate the development of players stepping up from last season’s u-17 and u-19 age-groups.
Despite the run of wins, including three away games on the bounce at Kilmarnock, Hamilton and Dunfermline, Frail and his coaching team have rarely been satisfied with the performances.
Young players looking to make the first team breakthrough at Celtic need to do more than at any other Scottish club which is why even John Herron, with a hat-trick in the 3-0 win over Ross County, didn’t quite get pass marks for his performance on Friday.
“John has the right temperament and is getting a consistent run of games now after being bothered by niggling injuries,” Frail stated.
“He scored a hat-trick which is something in his game that we like to see but we look for the basics from players and I’m not sure that we got that from many people and I include John in that.
“We had two penalties today and got one goal from them. John reacted well to the first one (scoring from the rebound) to follow in and took his penalty well. The second goal was a great one from a deep cross.
“Probably the stand out was Joe Chalmers, but we need to keep working hard on them. We’re happy with the win but we can do a lot better. The way that we train is designed to play a lot better than that.
“Overall we’re always pleased with the win but we need to dissect it and look more at the performance. We do that with each individual, we’re producing individuals because this whole team isn’t going to step up to the first team.”
Looking back at the performances since the turn of the year Frail added: “We were happy at Dunfermline but we’re trying to get the message across to them that it’s not so much about this team, obviously we want to win the league, but it’s about how players are developing and getting them closer to the first team.
“This season is tougher with teams bringing in overage players but that is better for players development. At times they have to win ugly but also try to marry that with the way that we like to play, passing the ball and recently we’ve not been doing both of those elements consistently.”
On Wednesday night Celtic play second placed Dundee United at Tannadice with a 7pm kick-off.
CLICK HERE for Ross County match report
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Delighted to hear these kind of comments from Frail, Celtic players at this level need to be more than dominant in the league if they’re going to have a chance against the quality of player they’ll face in the next-gen tournament. Good performances in that tournament seem to be key to reaching the first team, case in point Tony Watt who scored against barca youth and the big (OK they’re still pretty small stature-wise!) team.