Curbishley: delighted for Freddie

Alan Curbishley shares his thoughts in a post-match interview* that was understandably dominated by a certain 18-year-old striker ..

It's been a tough week. Three 4-0 defeats is unprecedented really; what could go wrong was going wrong and we needed to get a result just to bounce back. We've got that but we've also got the added bonus of a couple of young boys getting their first taste around the first team - on the bench and with Freddie Sears coming on and scoring. So we can all go home a little bit happier than we did last week.

Freddie's a young boy who's been at the club a long while. We didn't see too much of him last year but Kevin Keen, who's worked with him said to me pre-season that he should perhaps be training with us.

With the injuries, we've brought quite a few of the young boys with us to first team matches over the last couple of months and he's been one of them. He's been showing in training that he's worth his chance; we trained a couple of weeks ago where he did really well and a couple of the senior players were commenting afterwards how well he'd done. I just felt it would be nice to have him around us, and it's opened up for him.

He's scored his goal and the great thing about it was that Brad Friedel's made the save but he's carried on and finished it. I think the adrenelin took over there and I think his legs got shorter and shorter as the game went on! I think perhaps he was a little overwhelmed, because that can happen.

But we're delighted for him and for some of the other young boys that have been with us. Jack Collison got on at Arsenal over Christmas and James Tomkins who's played for the first team before was on the bench - then there's Mark Noble and Anton Ferdinand, so it's nice to have home-grown talent around you.

I think the fans were all desperate for him to get on. He was actually in the starting line-up yesterday; Bobby Zamora has been suffering with blisters, as strange as it may seem, and he didn't train yesterday. So Freddie trained, he was playing up front with Dean. Bobby came in today, he had a pain-killing injection and said he could play so that put Freddie back on the bench. He was a bit disappointed I think but grabbed his chance.

There's big games, vital games throughout the season and with the week we've had, for everybody, myself, we've all taken a bit of stick and a lot of criticism - and that isn't going to go away unless you're winning games. We've now got to go off to Everton next week and try and win there because if we don't I suppose it will all come back again.

I'm realistic enough, and I asked the club to be realistic this week in terms of what we've done this season with all the problems we've had. If anyone cares to look at the back of the programme just to see how many players we've got missing week in, week out, we've done great.

I did say that some of these young boys will get a chance in the coming weeks - and we'll see how it goes.

* Interview courtesy of the BBC's Match of the Day. KUMB.com is still banned from attending post-match press conferences at the Boleyn Ground - see here for more info.