This was certainly something of a conundrum. Craig scored 20+ goals for the Under-18s last season, and looked impressive pre-season, but when it came to the start of the League One season, he was frozen out and quickly joined St Alban's City on loan.
I saw Craig play for St Alban's while he was there, and he was out of position playing out wide, not through the middle, and he wasn't get many minutes on the pitch (he started one game and came on as a sub in a further three Blue Square South matches). Another potential issue was the service he got there - with all due respect to St Alban's, they weren't in the best of form during his time at the club and he wouldn't've been getting the quality of delivery that he got for our Under-18s and at Ipswich's Academy previously.
The flip-side is that you need to go out there and work hard at your game when you go out on loan to St Alban's, or Braintree Town as he later joined on loan. The main area that both Head of Youth Ricky Duncan and Steve Tilson pinpointed with Craig's game was improving his heading ability, and when he came back to play for the reserves, there were no real signs that it had improved dramatically.
I saw him a couple of times for the second-string after he came back, and he wasn't the same confident player that he had been in 2008/9 and in pre-season. He missed a penalty in one game, and a couple of one-on-ones that he would've put away in his sleep during the previous season. With that confidence gone, and with him only having secured a development contract, unfortunately his future at the club then was curtailed.
If he gets back to scoring goals regularly (he netted twice in nine games for Sudbury at the end of this season), then we could well see him back knocking on the door of League football, because when he played for the Under-18s he was one of the most destructive front men I've seen. When the squad beat QPR 5-3 away from home in the Youth Alliance Cup, he scored four and looked a class apart from anyone else on that pitch, and that was against a team that had won the Youth Alliance League three years on the trot.
I guess his failure to push on here shows that there is a big gulf between youth-team football and first-team football. There are some really positive signs from the likes of Franck Moussa, Stuart O'Keefe and Johnny Herd that you can make it, but all have had to plug away for long periods of time to earn their chance.
It seems that Steve Tilson is a really hard taskmaster when it comes to the youngsters breaking into the senior squad. I think he wants them all to be really hungry to get their chance, which is a good thing, but perhaps at times he has erred on the side of caution a little too far. His comments that it definitely wasn't Harry Crawford's goal on Saturday were strange; here was a lad making his full debut who, from my vantage point, appeared to get a clear touch on the ball (whether he knew too much about it or not) and the last thing that he would want is his own manager telling him that it wasn't his goal.
Ron Martin made a comment at the Q&A session that SUFC didn't include any youth team players in their squad list on the back of the programme as if this was a good thing. Before Saturday's match, Crawford had made five substitute appearances - surely that is worthy of being included in a squad list?
Knowing Harry Crawford as I do, I think he's the sort of resilient character that it won't faze, but it is the sort of thing that could unnecessarily knock a youngster's confidence. There were times at the start of the season when we couldn't field a full quota of substitutes and Calver was available but wasn't even put on the bench to make up the numbers and gain some experience of being around the first-team - maybe that would've been the confidence boost he needed.
