Crystal Palace will travel to Newcastle United for Thursday night’s FA Youth Cup Quarter Final clash hoping that they can take another step forward in their aim to reach the FA Youth Cup Final for the first time in 13 years.
Palace last reached the Final in 1997, when Haydon Mullins and Clinton Morrison were amongst their ranks but a Leeds United squad containing Paul Robinson, Harry Kewell, Jonathan Woodgate and Stephen Macphail eventually prevailed 3-1 on aggregate.
With many Palace followers excited by the prospects of the current crop of Academy players, the temptation for many is to look ahead towards a televised live glamour final, however one man who won’t be getting carried away is Youth Team boss Gary Issott who instead prefers to take one step at a time and focus on the job in hand.
Speaking to LFE Online Issott, said;
“There’s no point thinking about finals yet, the important thing is to concentrate on the job in hand.”
“We’ve done our homework on Newcastle and it’ll be at a tough game up there for us, of course for the lads it’s a chance to go out and play at St James’ Park and show they can handle the occasion and if they can do that we’ll stand a real chance of doing well.”
“The game at St James’ will be an experience that stays with them for a long time but it’s a culmination of the work we do every day on the training ground and the hard graft we’ve put in to get to this stage.”
“We’ve steadily improved with every round after almost stumbling past Bristol City early on in the competition. The next game at Derby was similar, in that we probably got a good 45 minute performance out of the lads and managed to get through but they know exactly what we expect from them now and exactly what it takes to go and kill teams off and I think we saw that in the last round when we went to Hull and put in a very professional performance.”
