By Arthur - 14 Mar 2014 10:54 AM
Recent appointments reveal a route-one confusion in FA's masterplan
Developing attractive, sophisticated football is the FA's stated aim but their actions suggest some muddled thinking at the Daniel Taylor
The Observer, Sunday 9 March 2014 08.16 AEST Jump to comments (195)
The great Brian Glanville once wrote that Charles Hughes, with his devotion to hitting the ball long and high, had stifled English creativity and distorted the Football Association's thinking to the point it had "poisoned the wells" of his sport. Evidently, not everyone agrees.
Did you realise Hughes received a lifetime contribution award when the FA's Licensed Coaches' Club held its dinner at St George's Park just before Christmas? No, probably not. Nobody really publicised it. There was no press release and, perhaps wisely, the FA's online report focused on the award for Tony Carr, West Ham's prolific nurturer of young talent, rather than the bloke who would have wanted Joe Cole, Rio Ferdinand and Michael Carrick to get it over the top.
But they clearly still revere his work. Go to the FA Learning website and, if you are one of the 24,000 licensed coaches with a password, there is access to an online shop where all sorts of stuff is recommended. Only one book, though: Hughes's Soccer Tactics and Skills, first brought out in 1980 and including seven pages under the heading "Passing Techniques – Lofted Passes" but only three for "Encouraging Improvisation and Inventive Play". Hughes went by the ethos that most goals were scored with five or fewer passes. Is this really, in 2014, a book the FA should still be actively promoting?
No surprises, though. A while back, this column revealed that the FA, for all its talk of moving into a modern era, had employed John Beck to take the next generation of coaches through their Uefa B-level badges.
Beck has a devoted group of younger followers and many have pointed out it is a long time now since the days when he went by the nickname of Dracula (on the basis that so many people thought he was sucking the blood out of the sport) and awarded cash bonuses to the players at Cambridge who kicked the ball the furthest. However, he does apparently still reference his tactics at Cambridge – gems such as "zig-zag to the onion bag", meaning to knock it up to the far post – during those courses at St George's Park, the place the FA trumpets as the future of English football.
Equally, it is not entirely clear whether the FA is operating to a clear and concise plan, or if it even understands its own philosophy, when Aidy Boothroyd, another manager synonymous with long-ball football, is suddenly deemed the best qualified candidate to manage and improve England Under-20s.
It is not the fact Northampton Town were bottom of League Two when he was sacked in December that startles me. Nor is it necessarily the way he has drifted through the divisions, or that he has been out of work for the past three months. No, it is his style that is the concern, at a time when the FA would like us to believe that the masterplan is to emulate the Spanish model, with a pattern of playing – attractive, on the floor, based on control and sophistication – that runs from the juniors all the way to the senior team.
A former player at Northampton once complained about a culture of "murder tackles" during Boothroyd's training sessions. Tom Reed, a columnist for the Northants Herald & Post, wrote last week the football "reached new lows, despite the ball being continually knocked far and high". The disciplinary record was poor and the tactics route-one. Reed wrote: "Technical players, given the lazy option of smacking the ball forwards to hold-up strikers, actually went backwards."
But none of this is actually a surprise. At Watford, Boothroyd took the team into the Premier League, which was a wonderful achievement. But it was not exactly progressive football. One of the team's sayings used to be "put it in the cage". The centre-halves would roar it during matches. The cage was the penalty area. Stop messing around, and put it in the cage.
Boothroyd is not remembered with huge fondness at Colchester or Coventry either and his latest appointment, I am reliably informed, has bemused some of his colleagues in other departments of the FA. Within his own profession, the words "numbing shock" have been used. Boothroyd once worked with Dan Ashworth, the FA's director of elite development, at Peterborough. A few years later, he appointed Ashworth to help him run West Brom's academy. Now, it is Ashworth's turn to do the hiring.
The FA announced the appointment with a quote from Boothroyd about his ability to "bring through" young players, naming Ben Foster and Ashley Young from the good old days at Watford nine years ago. Except Foster was 22 when he made his first appearance for Watford and it was Ray Lewington who brought through Young the previous season. Saido Berahino is also mentioned, from their time together at Northampton. Nice try. Gary Johnson signed Berahino in October 2011, on a one-month loan from West Brom. Boothroyd came in almost six weeks later. It was, as Reed puts it, a fleeting spell when "the striker failed to stand out despite his latent talent".
The bigger point is that the FA could surely have done better. England have failed to qualify in three of the past eight Under-20 World Cups. In the other five, they have played 16 games, and not won one. Nine defeats, seven draws. In last year's tournament, they lost to Egypt and could not beat an Iraq side whose players had grown up among invasion and war. At least England scored. Their previous goal in one of these tournaments was Alex Nimely's in a 1-1 draw with Uzbekistan in 2009. The last win? Go back to the group stages of the 1997 tournament in Malaysia, followed by a second-round exit. The 1993 squad, including Nicky Butt, Chris Bart-Williams and Jamie Pollock, finished third. Since then, England's record has been dismal.
"You need to understand Steve Peters can't help you do a Cruyff turn better," Steven Gerrard said after it was announced that the FA had recruited Liverpool's sports psychiatrist for the World Cup. "He won't help you hit a 40-yard pass any more accurately. Steve Peters is not going to help the players run an extra 100 or 200 metres or go any faster."
Can Boothroyd? Hopefully. This is a key role, entrusted with the outstanding young talent in the country, and it is vital for the future (Gerrard, by the way, does not mean a long, hopeful punt into the penalty area when he talks of a 40-yard pass).
Clearly, Boothroyd will have his admirers, just as Beck does and just like Hughes. But he will have to forgive me for not being completely surprised that there are accomplished football people within his own industry, not least at the League Managers Association, privately asking how this fits in with the masterplan.
"Hoofroyd" the fans used to call him when everything started to unravel at Watford. Glen Little never played for one of Boothroyd's teams but he did play against them. "Ha ha ha ha ha ha," he wrote on Twitter. "Get the youngsters kicking it as far as they can."
Ashworth and Boothroyd will no doubt say it is coincidental that they are old mates. Boothroyd will also presumably argue there is more to him, in a coaching capacity, than the image that has been nurtured over the past decade. Let's hope so. Hughes would no doubt approve. Beck, too. Others will wonder whether the FA has jumbled its priorities, not for the first time.
Clough said he could walk on the Trent but Davies seems intent on polluting it
Writing about Billy Davies is never particularly easy when his default setting is that the media are somehow out to get him. On the contrary, the football writers I know cherish their times beside the Trent, in keeping with the popular perception of Nottingham Forest back in the day. They are my team and, growing up in the Clough years, there was always a certain pride they were so many people's "second club".
It is certainly not easy seeing words such as "unpleasant" and "paranoid" routinely attached to the old place. Unfortunately, this seems to be the Davies way. Clough used to say he could walk on the Trent. Davies appears intent on polluting it and the saddest thing of all is that it is all so utterly needless and distractive when he is certainly not the worst manager at the City Ground, post-Clough.
He has just been banned from the dugout for five games after confronting the referee Anthony Taylor at half‑time during the 2-2 draw against Leicester. He later complained he had been sent to the stand for merely "raising my voice". What actually happened was Davies deliberately barged into the referee, and swore at him repeatedly. For "deliberately making contact" he was lucky the punishment was not more severe.
Most managers would issue an apology. Instead, Davies put out his response on Friday. "Under the advice of my legal team I will not be conducting any interviews until 26 March."
This is actually in keeping with a season of strange goings-on behind the scenes at the City Ground, featuring media blackouts, unexplained sackings and so much political manoeuvring that the Football League's chief executive, Shaun Harvey, went above Davies's head and asked for a meeting with the club's owner, Fawaz Al-Hasawi, in December to address issues facing the club.
It is certainly an odd carry-on when Davies's usual solicitor, Jim Price, happens to be his cousin and his agent, and has been working in a very senior position for Forest, despite failing the relevant fit-and-proper-person tests because he is currently suspended from the legal profession.
In Davies's first spell at the club, Price infuriated the old regime by advertising his availability for new jobs. He has attracted derision on Twitter but it is when Davies logs on to the same account that things get really interesting. "It's about payback," one message read. "Vengeance is best served cold. Trust me the innocent will not be harmed." Another Championship club's chief executive was quoted in the Daily Telegraph recently referring to Forest as "the Midlands version of North Korea".
Earlier in the season, Davies saw a photographer aiming his lens at the Forest dugout during a game at Millwall and marched over to the 18-yard line to confront him, repeatedly shouting: "Where are you from?" in his face. Stewards eventually had to get involved. The photographer was a freelance and covering the match, in part, for the Forest programme.
Davies is a reasonable Championship manager – sometimes very good, sometimes flawed – and, judging by the amount of money Hasawi has thrown at them, the club expect promotion. It fills me with a mixture of joy and dread. The spotlight burns a lot more brightly in the Premier League and, at this rate, the reputation of a fine club is nose‑diving as the team, potentially, go up. It makes no sense and if saying that makes me part of a media agenda, it is something with which I can live. There are no apologies for thinking it is better to operate with a measure of class, in the old traditions of the club.
http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/mar/08/football-association-fa-england-under-20s-steven-gerrard
|
|