Which wonderkids have impressed our expert panel? And why are some clubs getting more out of young players than others?
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00:00Hello. I'm Matthew Gregory, and welcome to the Premier League panel. This week, we're
00:08going to take a look at some of the breakthrough players of the season so far, and discuss
00:11why some teams seem to handle youth development better than others. To help me discuss all
00:15of that, I'm joined, as always, by an expert panel. National World's Curtis Leland is here,
00:21as is North East Football reporter Mark Carruthers. Curtis, we'll get to the nuts and bolts of
00:26why some teams seem to do better with young players than others in a minute. But let's
00:30start by just looking at some of the best young players in the top flight right now.
00:33Which new faces have impressed you the most so far this season?
00:37So I think the standout has to be John Duran from Aston Villa. Obviously, he's come in
00:42his second choice behind Ollie Watkins at the moment, but almost every time he gets
00:46on the pitch, he seems to score goals. He's scored the winner against Bayern Munich. And
00:52he's just getting to the point where I feel like he will get frustrated if he's not starting
00:56games because he's playing that well when he comes on. He's making such good impact.
01:00And I think he only costs 14 million from like Chicago Fire or something.
01:05Yeah, Chicago Fire. I can't remember how much he was. But his scoring rate's been ridiculous. I
01:10haven't sort of looked in the last couple of weeks. I know he has sort of drawn blanks in
01:13the last few games. But there was a point to which sort of, you know, minute for minute,
01:17he was scoring more goals per game than Erling Haaland than almost anyone in Europe. He was
01:21absolutely firing them in. I mean, it's a weird situation. How do you deal with a situation like
01:25that, Curtis, when you've got a player who's scoring that many goals, but he's still second
01:29choice? How do you handle having Watkins and Duran on the same team at the same time?
01:33I'm not sure, because it might affect the balance if they go for an old school 4-4-2.
01:38So it might be a case of just rotating them based on who's on form. And then whoever plays has
01:43essentially got to score a goal to stay in the team. So that might be the best solution at the
01:49moment. But I guess it's early days for Duran, he's only 20 as well. So I saw a statistic,
01:56it's something like he's scored something like three or four match winning goals, and it's
02:01already like joint level, like for an impact on a substitute. I did not, I actually knew this stat
02:07because I got it early in the season. But yeah, he scored his, I think it was his first three
02:10goals or three of his first four were all winners as a substitute. And that is already the most
02:15ever in a Premier League season by anyone, even Sheringham, Kevin Gallagher, all the great sort of
02:20super subs of old Solskjaer and so on. None of them ever scored three winners in a season and
02:24Duran did it straight away. I think the third was that absolute screamer against Everton.
02:30Mark, I mean, obviously, John Duran's been taken. Who's been your sort of pick of the bunch so far?
02:35Well, firstly, I'll say it probably would have helped having Jason Jones here, but I'm going
02:39to go for Ahmad Diallo at Manchester United. I feel as if there is a perfect storm coming
02:46for Ahmad because obviously with Ruben Amaran coming in, he's just hitting form at the right
02:50time. He's made a big impact, particularly in the last sort of four weeks, I would say,
02:54when he's really hit some form, found the net on a couple of occasions as well.
02:58We know what he could do. You could see that spell at Sunderland that he had, that he's just a little
03:02bit special. He's got something about him. And I just feel as if we've saw little bits of it at
03:08Manchester United since he went back there last season. I just think with the new manager coming
03:13in, with the style of play that Amaran plays, he could fit perfectly into that. And I think
03:18you're going to see the very, very best of Ahmad Diallo in the next few months. I think he's someone
03:22that will be a big player or could be a big player under the new head coach. I want to say manager,
03:28but it's head coach, isn't it? They've gone technical on him.
03:31I think he is now. Yeah. Ten Hag was a manager, Amaran was a head coach, I think. But
03:35we'll see how that all pans out.