The Celtic flaw exposed this international break amid Scottish emergence of 'next Gareth Bale'

GlasgowWorld

Ben Banks and Martyn Simpson talk what a Celtic academy product's impact on the Scottish national team tells us about youth development at Parkhead.

Transcript

00:00Big topic in Scottish football over the last couple of weeks has certainly been the development

00:04of youth players and how quickly or sort of inability at times to give young players a

00:09chance. Ben Doke has come onto the scene this week in particular and had his breakthrough

00:15Scotland games. He was a talent in the Celtic Academy, came through and made his debut at 16,

00:21I believe. He'd certainly played in the old firm before he went down to Liverpool and

00:28a huge club worldwide, to be fair, as are Celtic. Celtic and Rangers are two clubs this season in

00:36the Premiership who are yet to hand a single senior minute, I think it is, to a Scottish player

00:41under 21. There's Ben Doke and I'm sure Lennon Miller coming through probably as the next one

00:47off the under 21s production line who will be coming into the Scotland fold in the not too

00:52distant future. It's sort of a show that there's been a lot of doom and gloom about the youth

00:58academy, youth production in Scotland, but we do have some decent talents bubbling under the surface.

01:07Yeah, I think the biggest thing that it kind of diminishes is this argument about the B teams

01:13being in the lowland league. You hold up Rangers as an example. Rangers have been

01:22a lowland league side for, is it four seasons now, or five?

01:26They pulled their team out.

01:27Sorry, Celtic B. I apologise, Celtic B, not Rangers. You can see how much attention I pay

01:32to what's going on down there. Celtic B and Hearts B as well, but Celtic B is the prime example.

01:39How many players since Celtic B have been in the lowland league have used that as a spring pad to

01:45get into the first team? Celtic fans or whoever it is can say, this is how clubs in Spain do it

01:54and we need this to better the game as a whole. No, sorry, but you've had four or five seasons of

02:01this now and you've not brought on a single player into your first team through that system,

02:06so what are we talking about here? I think it's certainly that.

02:12But yeah, I think the reverse of that argument is probably with English football's target towards

02:19recruiting younger players. We see it not just from Celtic and Rangers. I'll say Celtic lost

02:23Ben Do, Rangers have lost Rory Wilson to Aston Villa. Hearts, Hebs, Aberdeen have all lost young

02:32players down south. It's nothing new. Even the likes of Dundee are seeing players being linked

02:39are still 16-year-olds because if a player is showing promise at that young an age,

02:46listen, I don't care how good you are, you need to be something pretty special to be breaking into

02:52Celtic or Rangers first team at 16, 17. If you're good enough to do that, then the way things are

02:59now, you are probably not going to be at Celtic or Rangers long enough to make an impact in the

03:05first team. So I think that really skews the figures and it's hard to say. But yeah, I think

03:13you can't really judge the whole system based on Ben Do because I think Ben Do is going to be a

03:17generational talent for Scotland. I don't want to big him up too much because I could be hugely

03:23disappointed, but right now the top end of the scale is, my hope is that Ben Do is going to be

03:28our Gareth Bale. He's going to be the one player that just carries the national team for the next

03:33decade. Obviously, we've got other terrific players, but they'll be around for the next

03:40World Cup. But after that, they are going to start phasing out a bit, the likes of your Andy

03:44Robertson's and your John McGinn's as they get into and deeper into their 30s. We're going to

03:51need to look to the future and whatever the future looks like, if Ben Do develops into the player that

03:57he clearly can be, then that alone is going to be, as we saw with Wales, having Bale and well,

04:04also having Aaron Ramsey, who at one point in his own right was a world-class player too.

04:08But as we saw with that, and as we've seen with plenty of other nations, not just Wales,

04:12having one world-class attacking player can carry you to tournaments and deep into tournaments as

04:19well, if you have a solid team around them. So purely, you can't put too much weight on one

04:25young winger's shoulders, but it does give me great hope, the way he's taken to international

04:31football and is already, for me, I know Steve Clarke talks about, oh, he's a bit young and

04:37maybe he played Croatia, so he's not going to play against Poland. Honestly, after Robertson,

04:42McTominay, Ben Doak's the next name that I'm seeing is definitely on the team sheet.

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