U21s round-up: Alex Samizadeh

There's not actually much we know about Alex Samizadeh.

He's a first year scholar, he's 16-years-old and he's from Manchester, but also has Iranian heritage. He also loves to score a goal. He scored a hat-trick on his U18s debut and then followed that up with a further three goals in his next three games before making the step up to U21 level and scoring on his debut against Cardiff City.

Samizadeh also celebrated his first goal at U21 level with a backflip somersault combination that Lomana LuaLua would be proud of.

The emergence of Samizadeh has rightly taken the limelight off Jamie Thomas at least for this week, with the pressure of expectation weighing on the young Welshman's shoulders being absolutely huge after a great start to the season.

Either way, with the first team misfiring this season, at least the future looks bright with these two in such great goalscoring form. It must be noted though that great reserve scoring records don't always translate to the first team and as such we shouldn't expect too much too soon. See: Conor Wilkinson, Tom Eaves and Tope Obadeyi.

In broader news, the young whites carried on their unbeaten run in the league with the 1-1 draw away at Cardiff, leaving us at a respectable 6th in the table.

However they slipped to their first defeat in all competitions against who else but our very own B team Wigan Athletic who astoundingly managed to beat us 3-2 away from home in the Lancashire Senior Cup. Regulars Alex Finney, Kaiyne Woolery and Rob Holding were missing, presumably in Lennon's thoughts for the Wolves game. We did however, give starts to Francesco Pisano and Liam Trotter to help build up their fitness along with forgotten man (and only senior international player) Medo.

Despite the experienced players on show, it was Jamie Thomas and George Newell who scored their fourth and second goals of the season respectively with Louis Robles scoring a hat-trick for the home team. Alex Samizadeh once again, almost made an instant impact when he came off the bench but his shot was excellently pushed behind by Latics keeper Kelland Absalom.

Next up for the U21s are Millwall at the County Ground in Leyland next Monday, of which I will bring you a full in-depth match report of.