{"id":749922,"date":"2026-08-26T03:58:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T03:58:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/749922\/"},"modified":"2026-08-26T03:58:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T03:58:13","slug":"noah-anyadike-cardiff-defender-becomes-youngest-player-in-efl-cup-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/749922\/","title":{"rendered":"Noah Anyadike: Cardiff defender becomes youngest player in EFL Cup history"},"content":{"rendered":"

“He’s making exceptional strides, and he’s a very talented player. We were very clear that he was the best option for this game based on how well he’s done.”<\/p>\n

Anyadike is the third player in under 12 months<\/a> to become Cardiff’s youngest player, following Rob Tankiewicz (16 years and 117 days) and Axel Donczew (15 years and 234 days).<\/p>\n

But the young defender from Carmarthenshire is not the youngest player in English Football League history.<\/p>\n

That honour is still held by Reuben Noble-Lazarus – Barry-Murphy’s former Rochdale team-mate – who debuted aged 15 years and 45 days in 2008.<\/p>\n

Barry-Murphy, who spent time as Manchester City’s youth team boss, understands the role Cardiff have in developing Anyadike as a person and a footballer.<\/p>\n

“I think [we] just [have] to expose him to the level of challenge that he’s capable of playing and pushing really,” he added.<\/p>\n

“As you saw, he’s very big for his age. He can play at a very high level, so we just have to keep pushing him to make sure that he keeps getting the exposures and the level of challenge he needs.<\/p>\n

“And keep educating him on the parts of his game that he needs to improve because he’s so young.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“He’s making exceptional strides, and he’s a very talented player. We were very clear that he was the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":749923,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-749922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=749922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/749922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/749923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=749922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=749922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=749922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}