Mansfield Town under-18s face Harrogate Town this Saturday at RH Academy in the U18 Premier League Professional Development League Cup (11am kick-off).
The contest is FREE for supporters to attend at: Woburn Lane, Mansfield, NG19 7RT
The under-18s faced Derby County at One Call Stadium in their last outing, narrowly losing 1-0 in the FA Youth Cup.
Professional development phase lead coach Steve Chettle provided his final reflections on the encounter.
“It was a great occasion with so many people there watching the kids play on the One Call Stadium pitch but it didn’t go how we planned.
“We gave a penalty away after three minutes against a very very good Category 1 Derby County team with youth internationals in.
“It was a great challenge for us and we managed to hold on until the last few minutes of injury time where we were pushing for an equaliser.
“It wasn’t to be, that cup run is over, and now we concentrate on the next game.”
Looking ahead to Saturday’s match, the coach added: “I think this will be our first Saturday fixture for a month and it has been a bit weird having weekends off and playing on Fridays but we play Harrogate for the fourth time already this season.
“We kind of know each other inside-out so we’ve been working on other things that we need to improve on in the week.
“We've looked at Harrogate and where we think we can exploit their weaknesses.”
On some of the squad’s standout performers of the season so far, he said: “We’ve had some great highlights this year [from a player development perspective].
“Ollie Taylor (midfielder) has done really well as a first-year, Elliot Hartmann (defender) is also a first-year at right-back.
“Ronnie Kokkinos (attacker) has been fantastic for us and when we play under-19s football. McKeal Abdullah has scored a lot of goals for us so we have got to continue to push those and make sure everybody else keeps developing and we’ll do well as a team.”
