Young stopper Scott Simons was back at work in Carlisle on Thursday morning having spent the first part of the week at St George’s Park on a goalkeeper training camp.
“I had him in the office this morning, to give me a rundown of how it went,” gaffer Keith Millen told us. “He loved it. You can see he’s got a real buzz about him, it was a great experience for him, the way they worked him and what they said.
“The feedback is he’s done well, and he needs to play games. That’s exactly how I see him anyway.”
“The young goalkeepers, the best thing for them now is to play games,” he continued. “We will look at that in the next few weeks.
“We’ve got two very good young keepers. We can’t have them both sitting in the youth team taking turns, we need to look at that as a club and see what’s best for the both of them.
“That could mean loans into men’s football somewhere, without a doubt. Scott has been with the first team, which has been good experience, but now Magnus is fit, and touch wood that remains the case, that would be the next conversation that we have.
“We need to talk about where can we maybe look to loan them out. It needs to be the right club that’s going to look after them, and that will be the next stage probably for them.”
Having already mentioned the return of the Magnus Norman, he told us: “In an ideal world we’d like to give Magnus some game time, we looked at fitting in a friendly for him, but with the amount of games we’ve got and the players we’ve got available it would end up being a youth team game.
“We haven’t got many pros who need game time. We’ll try and do something next week in training. We’ve got a free week, so we’ll set up some sort of match practice to give him some game time.
“It’s great that we’ve got him available again but it will take a bit of time for him to get fully fit. It brings competition for that place, which is a positive, and I’ve liked what I’ve seen from him so far. He’s a bring strong keeper who fills the goal and I like that presence about goalkeepers.”
And closing on the Mark Howard talks about an extended stay that were alluded to last week, he said: “There’s been no progress on that as far as I know.
“I think because we’ve had the games, we just concentrate on that, so there’s no progression in them.”
