He was probably fobbing you off by this stageOriginally Posted by MikeSB
. I was there then and he had Pat Slack as Assistant, Paul McCann & Barry Bennell who was brought in to run the Centre of Excellence coaching. Mike Kelly, the England goalkeeping coach, used to come over as well.
We only had a Centre of Excellence then and you could only sign for the Club at 14. The place was a ****ehole and Dario was doing his best to drag it into something resembling a football club, which pretty soon involved setting up the Academy structure which gave us Championship football no argument.
It is right to debate the current level of Academy funding, but to infer that the setup in 1984 was just as good is just bonkers.