[lfc-news] Academy: Derby cancelled after gales strike - Post

Liverpool Daily Post, 11 Jan 2005
Derby cancelled after gales strike
Academy Football with Chris Wright, Daily Post

LIVERPOOL under-18s FA Premier Academy League match with Everton
under-18s was postponed on Saturday due to high winds.

Gales up to force eight swept around the Kirkby Academy and Liverpool's
Academy operations director Frank Skelly had little choice but to call
off the match.

The winds had already caused some problems at the Academy when the
portable dug-outs the club uses was blown over and damaged.

U18s coach John Owens said: "The pitch was okay, but with the high winds
the safety of people was the main thing. But also it would have poor
quality football the way the wind was."

It was due to be the first Academy League Group C match after the
four-week Christmas break, but Liverpool now don't have another fixture
for two weeks.

This Saturday is the club's week to be inactive due to the odd number of
teams in the north west section. But with John Owens' U18s' next
competitive match now the FA Youth Cup fourth round tie with Tottenham
Hotspur at Anfield on Wednesday, January 19, the club have arranged a
friendly fixture for Wednesday evening with Crewe Alexandra (kickoff 7pm).

The match will be at Kirkby and Liverpool will use it as a means to get
some match practice for as many of the squad as possible. Owens said:
"With a view to the Spurs game in the Youth Cup it would have been good
preparation. Not all the same players would have been playing, there are
a few different players in the Saturday team, but it would have been
most of them. Saturday's game would have closed off the Christmas break
and got us ready for Spurs.

"But now we have invited Crewe to come along on Wednesday night with an
U18s team. We will get a game, but it will be to give everyone 45
minutes really to blow away the cobwebs, having not played for a while.

"I will use it like the way (England coach) Sven Goran Eriksson puts a
different team out in the second half of friendlies, I will make at
least seven changes at half-time. It won't be a 90-minute workout but at
least it will give them some action."

Both striker Conal Platt and central defender Adam Hitchen, who were ill
last week and would have missed the derby match, will return against
Crewe and be ready for the Youth Cup game with Spurs. Owens added:
"There was a positive in not playing in that there were no injuries but
if you worry about getting injuries all the time you would never play.

"We really could have done with the work-out ahead of Spurs."


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