Last season was something of a breakthrough year for our burgeoning youth academy: seven debutants, of whom the most successful (Tom Beere, Will Nightingale and Ben Harrison) made 16 starts between them.

It was always going to be difficult to follow that up, but the quality of our squad this year - at least, on paper - has raised concerns that some of our promising young players might struggle for the opportunities that we'd hoped they might get.

The change in formation from 3-4-3 to 4-4-2 in particular might hinder the chances of certain players.

Playing with three at the back would have given Nightingale an excellent chance to nail down a place in the side, while the abundance of strikers fighting it out for just two positions means George Oakley's playing prospects are looking dubious.

Of course, it's still early days: five youth team graduates played in the JPT against Plymouth, and Beere made his first start of the season against Exeter.

But more worrying has been the slight reluctance to field these younger players in the league - and perhaps also their failure to quite recapture the form they showed last season.

Harrison, for example, barely put a foot wrong in his occasional appearance last campaign, but looked very shaky last Tuesday (admittedly against a very tough opponent in Plymouth's Jake Jervis), and perhaps justified Ardley's preference of Jon Meades at left-back recently, in the absence of the injured Callum Kennedy.

Similarly Beere, who Ardley had hoped would really force his way into the side this year, had a fairly innocuous pre-season, and was generally outperformed by fellow youngster Christian Toonga.

Beere has looked back to his best in his recent starts, but an injury picked up against Plymouth might put him back on the sidelines for the near future.

Most surprising of all is the fact that Nightingale is yet to start a league game this season, despite an iffy run of form for most of our senior defenders.

This may simply be explained by a desire to give Karleigh Osborne and Paul Robinson a chance to build a partnership in the centre of defence.

But when given a chance against Mansfield (Osborne was withdrawn with injury after half an hour), Nightingale impressed with a very assured performance - which is more than can be said for some of his senior counterparts on occasion in the early weeks of this season.

As the season goes on, there will surely be more frequent opportunities for the young players to show us what they can do - and if they can match the high standards they set for themselves last time out, it will be hard for the management team to ignore them.

Let's just hope that those opportunities come sooner rather than later.