Youth & Reserves Review â€“ February 2010

James · March 3, 2010

February at the Chelsea academy has been a real mixed bag for the Youth and Reserve teams. One side has seen the Youth Team extend their unbeaten run from December and progress in the FA Youth cup to the semi finals and the reserves side has seen us been beaten in every game in the month.

Starting with the youth team. The month started with a tricky game at home to Arsenal, and Arsenal side that has been riding high in the academy league all season and doing very well for themselves on the back of winning the FA Youth cup last season, the game ended with a surprise scoreline for Chelsea at this level 0 â€“ 0. There were plenty of chances for both teams and Sam Walker produced some good saves while at the other end Josh McEachran missed a good chance to win the game for Chelsea, however a 0 â€“ 0 draw is a respectable result

. Next up was Charlton Athletic who Chelsea dispatched earlier in the season in the Youth Cup, a good game was played out here and Chelsea would feel they should have won having had the better chances. However a Danny Philliskirk brace who dropped down to get some game time was only good enough to earn a 2 â€“ 2 draw away from home. A pleasing sight in this game though was the return to the starting line up of Rohan Ince who has been out for the whole season with injury

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Following on from the Charlton game came the much anticipated FA Youth cup quarter final tie against Watford, a Watford team who had knocked out Liverpool in the previous round. What we saw was a Chelsea team really coming together and playing well together to totally dominate Watford and to play them off the park in a 4 â€“ 0 victory with goals coming from Kaby Djalo, Jeffrey Bruma, Marko Mitrovic and Josh McEachran, Chelsea have progressed to earn a 2 legged Semi final tie against Blackburn Rovers

. The last 2 games of the month saw us win out over Norwich City away from home 2 â€“ 1 with a very nice goal from Bobby Devyne and an own goal at the end to win it for us

. And a hard fought 1 â€“ 0 victory over Fulham, a game that was technically an away game but played at Cobham due to the weather conditions.

A couple of other notes finally on the Youth team, Aldi Haxhia has left the club with immediate effect after failing to impress for the last couple of seasons and Chelsea seem to have made their first signing for next season in the form of Swedish midfielder Amin Affane, which is a name we hope to see plenty of come next season.

Onto the reserve side now and it was a month to forget rather than to savour for Steve Holland and his men. The first hurdle we were to face was Aston Villa a side that continues to dominate the reserve league. Chelsea did fight very hard and were better than villa for the most part but could in the end fell to a 3 â€“ 1 defeat

. Next up was Arsenal, and again a game where changes were made to the team and we fought well and probably outplayed Arsenal, but again a game where we just could not take our chances and a game Fabio Borini will want to forget quickly after he missed chance after chance to win the game for us

. Last But not least was West Ham away, the game was not as good as what had previously been seen but the fight was there but again we could just not put away our chances and ended up losing 2 â€“ 1 even after West Ham were down to 10 for some bizarre violent conduct from the West Ham team

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Finally to round up this monthly review for February is a note of the appearances in the first team for the month. Firstly we saw Fabio Borini get another run out for the first team against Cardiff, even though it was only for about 5 minutes it is all good experience for the young man. Then we saw against Wolves Jeffrey Bruma come on for over half an hour to replace the injured Yuri Zhirkov, Bruma played at right back and unfamiliar position to him but he did a very good job and showed his ability. So for this month a very good run out for Bruma and a few minutes for Borini. Plus a regular showing of youth on the bench now, with Bruma, Matic, Kakuta and Borini all showing regularly for the Chelsea first team bench.