When Greg Dyke was chairman of the Football Association, they had a clock placed on the wall in the coaches' room, counting down to 2022.

This was the year Dyke believed England would be winning the World Cup.

"It's very easy to criticise," Marge Simpson said. "Fun, too," replied Homer. The clock was a daft idea, an open goal to scorn. Even Greg Clarke, Dyke's successor, described it as a "joke" and on the basis of England's recent performance against France one wonders if that ticking clock will end up with other regrettable relics, like the Brexit bus promising £350m for the NHS or Ed Miliband's stone tablet.

Grand targets are easily thought of, easily drawn, but they can take a long time to live down. At Carlisle United the most lurid was Michael Knighton's forecast of Premier League football in 10 years' time. How did that sound when the Blues, towards the end of that decade, were scrapping to stay in the Football League?

Anyone with common sense would hesitate before making themselves hostages to an arbitrary target. Today at Brunton Park it appears an age of realism has set in regarding their intention to produce good young footballers. It is not before time.

Back in 2013, the same year as Dyke's clock, Blues managing director John Nixon announced "one to nine in 10" - a plan to have nine home-grown players in a matchday squad come 2023.

This was, Nixon said, the club's "policy" - something former academy manager Alan Moore also said had been spoken about "a lot".

You don't hear much about that policy these days. Certainly you don't when the major individuals at United speak. Can you remember the last time a senior executive or leading member of the management or coaching teams mentioned one to nine in 10?

When announced as a new member of the academy staff this summer, Gavin Skelton said many sensible things about how the club could nurture teenage players. He did so again on Wednesday, at the club's fixtures breakfast, stressing how important it was to ensure the youth team develop as people as well as footballers.

Beside him was academy manager Darren Edmondson, who also talked the audience through his measured hopes for the season. Progress and development were the broad themes. "We've always had a philosophy and culture at the club of producing our own," he said, and Edmondson himself is evidence of that.

He also, though, explained some of the challenges facing a youth player who wants to make the grade in a first-team that has improved recently. As an attempt to bridge this gap, United have introduced development contracts for four 18-year-olds this season.

They are using cash from the controversial Checkatrade Trophy to pay for those deals, which may be a case of throwing bad money after good, and at the very least it is an experiment worth trying. But that is what it is - an experiment.

It needs time and patience to find out it if can flourish. It must not, surely, strive towards an artificial target - and thankfully it will not, considering you will struggle to find mention of that target in any previous Edmondson or Skelton (or Keith Curle) quotes to date.

Targets can be good, but are pointless unless the entire structure is built with them in mind. So far, one to nine in 10 has clashed with changes in personnel (Nixon is no longer MD, Moore is long gone) and wider decisions that raise the bar at clubs like Carlisle to extremely difficult heights.

The Elite Player Performance Plan, for instance, grants big clubs permission to poach young players without geographical restriction, for structured (but often modest) fees. The best ones go before they've had the chance to flourish at United's level. The the rest have to find their way.

At Brunton Park we are one year from halfway in one to nine in 10 and Carlisle, at surface level, are no further on. Their battles to escape League Two have been too prolonged to keep Kyle Dempsey and Brad Potts, while younger prospects from the academy, like goalkeeper Dean Henderson, left earlier, for even bigger things.

The Blues will start 2017/18 without a single senior professional who has come through the ranks. Mark Gillespie's rejection of a new contract is the final break from Eric Kinder's productive youth era, Patrick Brough's release another door that closed.

United cannot claim Danny Grainger as home-grown, given the Cumbrian was let go at a very young age before returning aged 27. It only leaves those teens on development contracts, and considering Curle preferred the experience of short-term loan signings last spring, it would be surprising if many of the four were on the bench for the opener against Swindon on August 5.

A great deal must be overcome, then, to imagine a sunlit future with a squad of Cumbrians - and this is without also considering the heavy administrative load of EPPP, which requires coaches to monitor and log practically every breath an academy kid takes.

Like teaching, also beset by performance charts and paperwork, it brings to mind the old saying that you don't fatten a pig by repeatedly weighing it. Heaven forbid that good coaches should be allowed to coach on their instincts and their experience.

Clubs are constrained by extra guidelines even as the odds are stacked higher. Those in charge of producing footballers for Carlisle United must be accountable, yes, but not, in this environment, to a finger-in-the-wind target, a "policy" that sounds, the more you think of it, like one of those manifesto pledges that later gets quietly nudged to the side.

When Graham Kavanagh was replaced by Curle, but Moore remained with the academy, it was plain that different ideas were now fighting for the same space. It was no way to bring about a successful "vision" for youth and clearly each man had his reservations about the other.

With Edmondson now there may be more harmony but it is just as important that there is no top-down message stalking his every move, as he and his staff try to do the best job they can, try to make United a better base for youth football overall, while the first-team manager, not unreasonably, works on the basis of picking players he feels are good enough.

Isn't that a better set of principles than a clock that will stop ticking in 2023, at which point we will stop and ask who will answer for it, and most probably find a show of no hands?