U21s hold on to beat Leicester

Long, McAleny and Hope are all promising but, on Saturday, Roberto chose not to include any of them on the substitutes bench.

So towards the end of the end match when Lukaku looked completely drained there wasn't a striker on the bench to replace him.

Why didn't Roberto stick Long on the bench? He might have made an impact for the final 10 minutes. He certainly would have provided fresh legs for the lumbering Lukaku.

Isn't it common practice to have a substitute striker on the bench?? With Kone out injured then surely it makes perfect sense to have Long on the bench?

Robles, Alcaraz, Coleman, Mirallas, Besic, Osman & Atsu.

1 goalkeeper, 2 defenders, 4 midfielders and 0 strikers.

Personally I think I would have left Osman out and put Long on the bench. Especially considering we all knew Lukaku wasn't fit and would struggle to play 90 minutes.

Roberto has since remarked that he's very pleased Lukaku got 90 mins under his belt, although I can't help but think that if Mirallas had replaced him, and Atsu had replaced McGeady, we'd have hit Leicester pretty hard on the counter-attack when they came at us.

It seems very strange that with a tiring team we only made two of our three substitutions and only after the 80 minute mark. Has to go down as a negative against Roberto. Atsu, Besic and Osman all could have made a difference and none of them even played.

However, none of this make Long or Hope better than the players who were on the bench against Leicester, it's a big gap from the u-21s to the Premier League.

Sadly, from what little I've seen, I doubt any will ever make the grade. Our club need players of the calibre of Lukaku, Besic and Barkley to improve us, and I reckon those 4 are at least a couple of grades below.

From our U21's, our best prospects for first team minutes seem to be Browning and Garbutt. The former playing very well during pre-season and the latter also doing well last season on loan.

Therefore, Roberto is obviously delighted that Lukaku did a full 90 mins, which didnt happen very often last season I seem to recall, and that other like 'tubby' McGeady and 'past it and too slow' Pienaar managed to get a real dose of fitness boosting exercise in.

As Roberto has previously stated they get the ball out pre-season first day rather than run up and down sand dunes.

This may mean that we start the season a bit slower than teams like Leicester who have only physical effort to offer ( like us of yesteryear ) but will mean the players last longer and achieve a better level across an entire season.

It's a marathon, not a sprint, we started sluggish last season, but ended up with 6 more points than ever before and were very consistent.

Also, what about the fitness of Besic, Osman and Atsu? You make a good case about pre-season in general but it doesn't really affect the criticism of the substitutions which should have been made. I'll go as far as to say that Martinez's poor decisions cost us two points on Saturday.