Cardiff City’s U18 side continue their Premier Development League campaign on Wednesday, as they travel to The Den to take on Millwall – KO at 1:30pm.
The young Bluebirds bounced back to winning ways over the weekend, as they defeated Fleetwood Town 2-0. An Alyas Debono header coupled with a late Mannie Barton penalty gave a youthful U18 side all three points.
The victory moves Tom Hutton’s side up to third in the PDL South with four games remaining. They are eight points behind Charlton Athletic, who currently occupy second place, and have played the same number of games as the Addicks.
This Wednesday sees City travel to London to take on Millwall at The Den. The Lions find themselves in eighth place in the table, having won ten of their 25 games this season. They’ve lost their last two league games, with the latest won coming on Saturday, losing at home to Sheffield Wednesday. When these two met at the start of January, it was City who ran out 3-1 winners: Troy Perrett, Dan Ola, and Jake Davies scoring the goals.
Before the match, we caught up with U18 Lead Coach Tom Hutton.
“We play four games now in ten days, so the challenge of turning the boys around and getting them ready physically and prepared for the next game has to happen quickly," Tom began. "That will have already started after the Fleetwood game, and we will try and prepare them for this game against Millwall as best as we can.
"The game is at The Den, which gives the boys an experience of playing in a stadium. We’ll be expecting a tough challenge. Millwall got to the Semi-Final of the Youth Cup, which shows they’re a really good group, but we’ll look to continue to build on our performances and keep the momentum going until the end of the season.
“We want to try and continue to perform as positively as we can, and the more U16s we can integrate into the programme and expose them to the U18 programme the better.
"We want to be as positive as we can and try and pick up as many good results as we can. We don’t want the season to fizzle out, we want to finish strong and everything from training to games is a chance for all these boys to improve.”