Blues academy manager Dean Wright says the progress Cameron Humphreys has made from the academy into the first team exemplifies how the strategy for integrating young players needs to be going forward.

Humphreys, 19, who has been at the club since he was a seven-year-old, made his first senior appearances last season but this year has cemented his place in the first-team squad and latterly, in the absence of Lee Evans and Dom Ball, has been a regular starter in the centre of midfield alongside skipper Sam Morsy.

Wright says youngsters having a path through from the academy into the first team is vital.

“I think what is probably important to say is that these boys have got opportunities to play,” he told TWTD. “Obviously Cameron is the main one at the moment and Cameron fits in with what I think the strategy has got to be for us.

“The guys in the academy have done a great job with him of getting him to a point where the first team manager has gone, ‘Actually, we want him now and we’ll be responsible for the next part of his development’.

“He trains with the first team every day, has had a few appearances and when an opportunity has arisen, he’s got in there and taken it and been really good.

“And that’s ideal for what we want and that’s a really good pathway for what we want to demonstrate at this club; that you will get chances in and around [the first team] and if you’re good enough you’ll get the chance and you’ve got to maintain being good enough to keep in and around it.”

He says there’s no point in keeping a player such as Humphreys in the U21s simply to make the U21s stronger with the ultimate aim developing the player, not having the best U21s side.

“That’s probably where we’re looking at with a club now,” he reflected. “We could quite easily play Cameron in our 21s team every week or have kept him in and around it and undoubtedly the 21s would be better by having him in there, but that’s not what we’re here for, we’re not here for team success.

“It’s important to the players, they want to be competitive and they want to do well and all the staff do as well, and we would never say that we don’t want to win games and be competitive because everybody in football has got that in them, but not to the detriment of giving players an opportunity.

“I think Cameron is the first hopefully of many where we might sacrifice a little bit of team success with the 21s, but the right thing for him is to train with the first team and earn his opportunity with the first team, which is what he’s done.

“We’ve had that throughout the season. There have been days where we’ve had a Monday or a Friday fixture where players have gone over and trained with the first team rather than playing in the 21s game and you might look at it on the face of it and people might ask why he’s someone hasn’t played or has come off after an hour. But he might have trained with the first team that morning and that was more important or we tried to balance the day.

“[U21s manager] John McGreal and myself are always with the first team staff and say, ‘If you guys want anyone, take them’ and that gives us an opportunity to get an U18 in and around the 21s, which is great for them as well.

“I think you’ll see more of that, where there are more younger players in and around the 21s. There are regularly 21s every day going over and training with the first team, which people wouldn’t see but that’s happening all the time.

“The way that the first team work and the way they train is that they want bodies, they want numbers and they will always come and ask every morning for this person, this person, this person.

“And that then is where we say to the players, ‘That’s your opportunity’. We can’t control what happens over there now but we tell them to go and do what they do and try and impress.

“The lads that have done that, Gerrard [Buabo], Edwin [Agbaje], people like that, have gone over and people have gone, ‘They’re alright these lads, we’ll have them again tomorrow’ and so on and so on, and that just builds where they then just start to migrate over to being more around the first group than our group, which is exactly what we want and myself and John are pretty aligned with that, which is a good thing.

“We would rather see the boys get the opportunity, we’re not going to sit and sulk that our 21s team is weaker today because the first team have taken whoever to train. No, that’s what we want.

“We had a game a few weeks ago when we played Reading and we got hammered [7-2], but we had three of four 16-year-olds on the pitch at the end, we had scholars who hadn’t played before that got exposure, some started, some came off the bench.

“And actually for me, as someone who is passionate about youth development, I don’t want us to get hammered obviously and that was probably the extreme that day, but I get more of a buzz walking over to that game thinking, ‘I can’t wait to see how he does, it’s going to be hard for him, but I can’t wait to see’.

“We go away after it and say that he struggled a little bit with that, that and that, so let’s get him on the training pitch tomorrow and let’s start working with him again, so the next time he gets the opportunity he’s more ready for it.

“But we only find that out by giving the lads the exposure and I do think that’s important for us.

“Going back to the category argument, the standard of cat two for a club like this is not always as challenging as it needs to be, so us just having the oldest U21 team and the oldest U18 team, who might win every week and win the league and all the rest of it, but maybe not producing enough players is not the way I want to go about it.

“I think we’ve got to challenge our best players. We’ve got 16-year-olds that start in the 21s every week now. We’ve got young players that train with the first team that are still scholars that train with the first team every day, that’s what we’re here to do.

“We’ve got 16s that start in the 18s every week and that is the appropriate challenge for him and some of these boys if they just played at their own age group year after year after year, they will plateau and the moment passes.

“And that all becomes more difficult, it’s more difficult to get loans, it’s more difficult to get a first-team member of staff to have a look at him because it’s that feeling of ‘Why’s he not already done that?’.

“That’s what we’re trying to do. Not for the sake of it and not to get any pats on the back or sympathy, people saying ‘You were young today’, we will be brave enough to give people opportunities and be balanced enough to know that kids might struggle and have a bit of a challenge and we might have a 17-year-old playing against a 20-year-old in certain games, but that’s what we’re here to do.

“We’re here to expose players and then the key bit which people won’t see is what we then go away and do at the training ground in terms of showing clips, getting them on the training pitch, doing extras, getting them in the gym if they need to get stronger, whatever it is to make sure that player’s been given everything they need to keep maintaining progress through the pathway.

“And hopefully that ends up producing a load of local lads that walk out representing the first team.

“But if not, they go and represent somebody’s first team somewhere else and we have a depth of talent that hopefully we look at it in a few years and the number of Ipswich Town-produced players across all levels of the game.

“Hopefully we’ll have lads in our team, hopefully we’ll have some lads who are at the top levels of the game and playing in the Premier League, we’ll have some that might be in League Two or the National League or whatever playing and earning a living out of the game regardless of the level.

“We have to be realistic that not everybody’s going to play for our team, so we have to make sure that if they’re not, we don’t just keep them in a group to make the group stronger, that we say they need to look at what’s next.”

Further instalments of TWTD's in-depth interview with Wright can be found at these links:

Photo: Matchday Images

Carberry added 23:08 - Dec 14 This doesn't sound particularly convincing. The 1st team squad need some bodies so we tell the kids to go over there and get noticed. Hardly a pathway. Is this what Kieron Dyer was so upset about?
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FramlinghamBlue added 05:42 - Dec 15 This is what KD got wrong - used to sulk that he didn't have his best team. Both Adem and Kieron wanted to win their respective leagues, by their own admission rather than always develop players into the first team. Carberry - surely this is a pathway - it can't be set in stone like ‘on March 5th we will take Humphreys across' it's surely more about when opportunities occur the U21ms are ready

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Carberry added 13:15 - Dec 15 I don't believe what you have described is a pathway, Framlingham. Forget the date distraction, what should happen is young players are monitored, assessed and when they are ready recommended to train with the first team squad, not a random request for bodies as described here. And I just don't believe Adem and Kieron would have prevented youngsters from gaining experience with the group just to win their own games (unless they knew there was no pathway). The truth is we don't know how these dynamics work, only what we can draw from interviews like this and the actions of those who formerly coached at the club.

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