GRAHAM Taylor once said to me at Watford that only after making 100 senior appearances can a player call themselves a professional footballer.

Swindon Town deserve a lot of credit for having the bravery to hand the lad Jordan Young his debut this week and hopefully he doesn’t just have a couple of cameo appearances.

Hopefully he goes on to have a very good career with Swindon and if they don’t get into the Championship or the Premier League, then he goes on to play at a higher level.

At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about for youth academies – developing players for the first team.

Sometimes, too many youth coaches are concerned with winning matches and making sure that teams do everything to stop other sides. It’s all very aggressive and it’s endemic in English football.

Clubs will go out and look at players from other clubs, and foreign is seen as sexy too, but are those players better than the ones we’ve got in this country? I’m not sure.

What we seem to miss out in our development coaching are the basic skills. When you see England play another country, they don’t look as technically sound and sometimes when you bring a young player into a first team, they look lost because they don’t have those basics to fall back on.

It was 21 years ago that I set up the first football academy at Cirencester College and for the first five years there, we didn’t lose a game – I know that sounds silly because I’ve said that winning isn’t everything but we were doing things properly.

I want to do things properly with the academy I’m setting up at the Swindome.

I still live in the Swindon area and I love the football club, and I think there’s a great catchment area here.

If they haven’t seen it yet, I urge people to go and see the Swindome because it really is a facility that will blow your mind and it means that come snow or a hurricane, we’ll have a great surface to train on.

We’re going to start with camps and clinics for youngsters to stay healthy and have fun and then move on to the academy for boys and girls over 16, with the aim of producing players.