Good afternoon everybody and welcome back to Carrow Road for this afternoon's match against Birmingham City.

This summer has witnessed a very busy pre-season programme for our young schoolboy players with a mix of training sessions and matches against local professional teams. Assistant Academy Manager, Dean Rastrick, has once again made very good use of the schoolboy's time off from school by putting together this comprehensive programme and giving them as much football time as possible at the training ground.

Various age groups from teams such as Colchester United, Southend United and Rushden and Diamonds all travelled to Colney Training Centre to take part in these matches, these teams are not Academy clubs and therefore do not feature in our player's usual fixture programme. So it was good for players of all clubs to get a feel of the standard each team is capable of playing.

In addition to this, local junior clubs were invited to take part in football festivals at Colney Training Centre, where teams were entered into a 'round robin' of matches. These games gave our recruitment team a chance to pick out the best players from each side and invite them to the Club for an official trial.

The programme has given our recruitment team of Paul Lowe and Colin Watts the opportunity to bring in a number of trialists in the hope that some of them will catch the eye and do well enough to be offered a registration at the Club.

The schoolboys kick off the fixture programme with matches against Arsenal next weekend and I am sure the lads will be hoping to put in place all they have learnt through the summer period.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dean, Paul and Colin for all the hard work they have put into this schoolboy programme and my part-time coaching staff for their dedication and support throughout the summer. The programme has proved to be a real success and I have no doubt that the players will have benefited from this extra time spent at the Club.

Enjoy the game.

Ricky Martin
Academy Manager