Jack Pitt-Brooke, who covers Tottenham Hotspur for The Athletic, appeared on the latest edition of The Next Big Thing podcast from The Athletic which focused on 18-year-old Spurs left-back Dennis Cirkin and during the show, he spent some time talking about Spurs youth coach Ryan Mason.
Mason, who was forced to end his playing career back in 2018 due to a head injury, became a youth coach at Tottenham in the summer of 2019 and the 29-year-old received praise from Pitt-Brooke on this podcast when he talked about how Mason is performing in his current role at the north London club, with the journalist sharing that he believes it’s really helpful for the Lilywhites to have him as a youth coach.
Here is what Pitt-Brooke had to say about Mason in full: “He is, in fact, for a coach a very recent example of a player who made that transition from being in the Tottenham academy all the way up into being in the Tottenham first team – he was playing first-team football for Tottenham only four or five years ago.
“He’s clearly very, very popular and highly rated with lots and lots of people at Spurs and I think, in this kind of institution, it really helps to have someone like that who has been on the other side of that progression.”
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TIF Thoughts on what Pitt-Brooke had to say about Mason…
It will, of course, have come as a massive blow for Mason to be forced to retire from his playing career while still only in his 20s, however, perhaps the fact that he is a young coach who was a member of Tottenham’s youth academy as a player less than a decade ago, gives him a unique perspective as a coach and maybe he can use that to his benefit in his current role, as perhaps he has a different understanding of Spurs’ youth academy than other coaches would.
If that is the case, then it certainly seems as though Mason’s experience of having graduated from Spurs’ youth academy as a player not that long ago may be serving him well, with Pitt-Brooke explaining that the 29-year-old coach is “very popular and highly-rated”.