'It does my head in' - Mark Robins sets out stall for Stoke City academy talent
Mark Robins is determined to make sure opportunities are there for players coming through the Stoke City academy to prove they can make it in the first team.
Robins has brought back 19-year-old Nathan Lowe from a loan spell at Walsall and saw him score the opener when he started in a 1-1 draw with West Bromwich Albion on Saturday. Lowe is now hoping to keep the shirt for an important mid-week trip to Portsmouth . It was described to Robins as a gamble but the manager wasn’t having that.
“Shall we start putting hurdles in front of everybody?” he said. “It does my head in. Yes, there’s a step up, a natural step up, but go and play, go and enjoy it. He’s got to start somewhere. It’s like, ‘Ok, shall I not play him because he’s young and he’s been playing in League Two?’
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“For me it’s really important that people get opportunities at the right time and it might be the right time and it might not quite be the right time but when is he going to get a chance? That’s not just with one player, we’re talking about a whole host.
“Up and down the country we’ve got academies which are stocked with players, stocked with talent and a lot of them go out of the game because people are concerned about the obstacles in front of them and worried about the level.
“Yes they’ve got to get to a level but they’re not going to get there unless they get the opportunity are they?”
Stoke are still expected to try to bring in new strike power in the January transfer market but, amid constraints due to Financial Fair Play rules and with the club’s current injury list, it seemed increasingly like an impossible decision to leave Lowe out on loan.
Emre Tezgel was also on the bench at West Brom as well as Jack Griffiths and Kieron Willox while England youth keeper Tommy Simkin, on loan at Walsall, has been back to make introductions and England youth midfielder Sol Sidibe has featured too before being diagnosed with a back injury. There are high hopes also for players such as Jaden Dixon, Freddie Anderson and Darius Lipsiuc.
Robins said: “You’ve got to look at circumstances within the club and everything else. It’s not just straightforward.
“We’ve got a set of circumstances within the club that mean I have to make certain decisions and sometimes that means bringing players back who have been scoring a bag load of goals at a League Two club and giving them an opportunity to play in a really difficult arena, it was a really tough game to come into, but he got his goal, worked hard and there are things there that I know he will be looking at to try to improve his game further.
“He will keep doing that until he’s made three or four hundred appearances and even then he still might do it because that’s the way he is. He’s got that mentality, which is fantastic, because he can start to develop a lot more than some might.”
Lowe has set himself a target of scoring at least 25 goals this season all in for Stoke and Walsall and took himself up to 19 at the weekend.
Robins is clearly relishing the chance to work with him but he won’t go public with whatever he thinks about the forward’s potential.
He said: “I don’t expect anything. I expect what he is. We in this country get asked questions that build people up to knock them down. He can be anything he wants to be like everybody else. We start putting limits on them or start to expect too much and that can cause unnecessary problems really. Just go with the flow, just play the game. He will work really hard to keep learning and then see where it takes you. He’s definitely got a lot of really good attributes.”
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