Will our kids play a bigger part next season?

With all of the talk and speculation on the transfer front at the moment, which is understandable I may add, it is kind of easy to forget about other aspects of the club.

The aspect I'm going to focus on in this article, as you may have guessed by the title, is the youth aspect. It's an interesting subject that pretty much everyone has an opinion on, but with the club putting so much effort into their youth setup it kind of leaves me wondering just when we'll start to reap the rewards of developing our own players. We've done it with Andy Carroll in recent years, but who is going to be the next one, or two, or three even, to make the step up to the first team?

Well I guess the obvious one has to be Shane Ferguson. Towards the back end of last season we saw him get more minutes on the pitch, and he didn't let us down! We saw pace, technical ability and intelligence from the young lad from Northern Ireland as he put in a string of superb performances. Left-back or left-wing - you decide, but young Fergie is equally adept at playing both positions. I expect to see more of him next season.

Michael Richardson is highly-rated at NUFC, so perhaps he could be in with a shout? I very much doubt he will get thrown in at the deep end, although I do expect that we'll see a bit more of him next season, either in the league as a late sub at some point or in the early rounds of the Carling Cup providing circumstances allow.

How about Phil Airey? The lad has been prolific for the reserves, even if he does look a bit waif. He made his debut last season in that horrible game against Stevenage, but I expect we'll see more of him again next season especially with Nile Ranger seemingly heading for the St James' Park exit door.

Another two who really should be making their mark on the first team next year are Haris Vuckic and Tamas Kadar. I really feel for these two lads as I feel that their formative years have been ruined by serious injuries. Both players have suffered broken legs and other niggles, but both have undoubted talent and will no doubt show that in time.

Tim Krul isn't really a kid as such, although in goalkeeping terms he is. Krul is now a full international and my money is on the Dutchman to be our No1 next season. Believe it or not, but it's been five years since Krul joined us as a starry-eyed youngster, but now could be his time to shine.

I'll be honest, I really thought I would struggle to write this article and I only had a bash at it because I know some of you guys like talking about our youngsters. In actual fact I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to write, and how easy it was to think of players who are coming through our academy that could end up getting a chance in the first team in the very near future. In fact I've probably missed a few!

So how about that for something positive eh? I'm not saying that we should throw them all in now and have a team full of youngsters - Ossie Ardilles tried it through necessity and it very nearly backfired on us. However there is nothing to say that we can't play one or two here and there to give them some experience and see if they really can make the grade.

This youth setup could be about to start paying us back!