Is the future Bright and Eze?

All good points and questions stoatey! As I said elsewhere, I believe that McClaren and the Board have opted for survival this season, rather than the planned building of a team for the future. If I am right, this beggars the question of why Ollie needed to be replaced (and what damage that caused in the initial games)...? Anyway, our young talent has gone outside on loan for their current experience and will return at season end to replace others on loan or fight for their places.

The point about Ollie is really relevant because the last time we played Birmingham was under his management on 28/4  and we won 3 - 1. In the team that day were 7 youngsters  Lumley, Kakay, Furlong, Manning, Eze, Chair and Bright. There were 2 more youngsters on the  bench  Smyth and Tilt. Now that really was developing young players.

The intention was clearly to play younger players but as others have said the poor start to the season caused a bit of a panic and with it our ideals went out of the window.

Lee Hoos has spoken before of avoiding the loan market and it being dead money but when we didn't get bodies in before the permanent signing deadline AND we started with 4 defeats it forced our hand.

So now we have probably brought in the players who will keep us up (Wells and Hemed are a quality strike force) but won't we be in the same position in 12 months time once the loan players leave?

I'm assuming we loaned out Manning and have been left with Cousins and Goss simply because there was interest in Manning and not in the others.

The younger players were perhaps viewed by the club as better than they actually are right now. Smyth has lots to develop, Kakay has barely played in his career, BOS is raw, Eze can't defend etc. To me it seemed like the club believed they would all become world beaters overnight.
When that didn't prove to be the case we took steps to try and ensure survival.

Being in The Championship is clearly more important to the owners than playing/developing the young players.

Would we not be better served playing all the young players and then even of we go down next season to League One they are all a year wiser and have 40+ games under their belts. Then if we came back up the kids have all been playing for 2 seasons together, have all developed and are close to 100 games each. That team in The Championship in 2 years would be a lot better equipped. We'll never know but I'd prefer that to treading water in the Championship year after year with loan signings our only hope.

I agree with northwest
We couldn't simply stick with the kids and get battered most weeks and the confidence of the players and the fans thrown out of the window
I think the loan signings are a touch of genius as they are what we needed,2 good strikers at our level a very experienced left back in rangel who is no spring chicken but knows what he's doing and the defence is far better with him in the team
The new guy from stoke is a mean machine who can play anywhere at the back
All good on paper but I still think we look a little disjointed in places and McClaren has to find a way to get the team to play a style and a system that gets us winning more than losing and nicking away draws