Limbrick: Reaction shows how far U18s have come

Goals from Olufela Olomola and Josh Sims had given Limbrick’s side a two-goal lead at half-time, but after Isaac Christie-Davis had made it 2-1, substitute Tammy Abraham earned the visitors a point late on.

Limbrick says seeing his players so disappointed after the game, despite the point against the league leaders, shows his players have come a long way since the start of the season.

Speaking after the 2-2 draw to youtube.com/southamptonfc, Limbrick said: “It shows how far we’ve come that the boys are disappointed that they didn’t win the game and play a lot better.

“That shows how far we’ve come really, we might have been happy with that at the start of the season, now we really aren’t. There are high standards throughout the club so we want to be doing better.

“We all thought that in the first-half we didn’t play to our usual standards and we found ourselves 2-0 up at half-time. But we didn’t pressure that well.

“Our playing out from the back and our tempo tended to be a little bit slow, we struggled to penetrate. We said a few words at half-time which I thought was fair.

“The idea in the second half was to get everything back on track, get our pressing right and start to play more football through the thirds. We tried to do that, but it didn’t really happen for us.”

Limbrick felt there were some bright individual moments throughout the game, but admitted the introduction of a couple of substitutes for Chelsea swayed the game in their favour.

He added: “There were some good bits, Dan [Demkiv] had a couple of good runs, Simsy [Josh Sims] obviously scored a great goal, it was nice to see Olufela [Olomola] score in the first half and Niall [Mason] with a good cross.

“Apart from those pieces, we came in at half-time and we weren’t really happy as a team, even though we found ourselves 2-0 up against a very good Chelsea side.

“They brought two or three really good players off the bench and that was tough for us to deal with. We got a little bit tired at the end I think.

“We needed to defend a bit more solidly, but it was nice to keep the point at the end after we conceded late on last week. We want to be doing better, hopefully we can do that against West Brom and then leading into the West Ham [FA Youth Cup] game.”