Podcast: New facilities give pool of talent chance to develop

The Aztech Soccer Arena is now open for business and boasts impressive facilities including state-of-the-art 3G pitches both indoor and out as well as a ‘Tech Zone’ with half-a-dozen pieces of equipment that help players improve their game, which in time could help produce more professionals from Guernsey.

• Listen to a full interview with Rob Jones about the new Aztech Arena on this week's Guernsey Press Football Podcast

‘When you hear the stories about what our talented youngsters do when they go away – and we’ve got five or six professionals away in the UK at the moment – and what they are put through in terms of academy, we’re only scratching the surface here, even with the highly-successful GFA academy, [where] they have an hour a week and that’s not really enough, said owner Rob Jones on the latest Guernsey Press Football Podcast.

‘We need to be really giving people much more focus and game-time and with a facility like this it’s much easier to do.

‘The real talented youngsters, they can definitely use this as much as they want, we’ve got memberships, we’re going to have high performance players coming down here and using the equipment, so the exposure is going to be a lot greater than it has been traditionally, and that can only be good for Guernsey football.

‘We have a fantastic pool of excellence over here, we just need to nurture it, we need to grow it and we need to keep people in the pathway beyond the traditional 14 or 15 where some people fade away.

‘We’ve now got what we think is a really strong product which keeps people engaged to 18, 19, 20 then to get into senior football, keep them in the game, because we have got tremendous talent over here, we’ve proved it – the Alex Scotts, the Mayas, the Ben Aceys, the Joe Adamses – we have got a great pool of resources over here and this gives people the best opportunity, I think, to try and develop that.’