Authors: Michael Calvin
Suddenly, the spell was broken. The elders drained their tea, and dispersed. Everton Reserves were in town. Aston Villa’s development squad needed to be checked out. There were things to do, players to see. I, too, got my coat. It was time for a fateful trip to the seaside.
THE FISH HOUSE,
situated in a parade of shops 150 yards from Roots Hall, home of Southend United since 1955, is a place of pilgrimage for football scouts. The portions are generous, the plaice is exceptional, and the batter is light, crispy and golden. The chips have the thickness of a labourer’s fingers and the mushy peas prove that the dish is not exclusively a Northern delicacy. Mel Johnson found a corner table, close to the door, and ordered a large cod, to be washed down by his customary black tea.
The place was packed with supporters, and a florid man in a cheap grey suit offset by a chain-store shirt-and-tie set asked to share. He was friendly, forthcoming. A veteran journalist on a local news agency, evidently with good contacts in the Southend boardroom, he regaled us with tales of lower-league ducking and diving. Freddy Eastwood, a Welsh international striker from Romany stock who had just returned to the club which once sold him for £1.5 million, was a potential source of regular freelance income. ‘Piled on the weight a bit,’ he said. ‘Still decent at this level, but he can’t really run.’
Johnson, Liverpool’s senior scout in the South, shot me a glance. He knew I was obeying the first law of football scouting: reveal only what is convenient to you. The journalist’s news editor would not have been amused. He left without asking what either of us, who admitted to having no allegiance to Southend or their opponents Cheltenham Town, were doing at a League Two game on a Friday night. The ‘Liverpool swoop’ story that was one pertinent question away from realisation remained unwritten. ‘Information, information, information,’ said the scout, with a chuckle.
Johnson and I had met at a hotel just off the M25, and travelled down the arterial road into Southend in his Audi saloon. Gossip was punctuated by a call from his son, Jamie, who, crestfallen, reported that Kenny Jackett, his manager at Millwall, had ‘the right hump’ with him. Jackett had been impressed by Karim Rekik, a young Dutch defender of Tunisian descent, who was on loan at Portsmouth from Manchester City. He wanted to know why he hadn’t been alerted to his potential at left back; Jamie had monitored his progress with City’s youth and development teams, who played him as a right-sided, left-footed centre half, and argued that it was impossible to make a telling judgement when he was being played out of position.
‘That’s scouting,’ consoled his father, who retained close links to Jackett, with whom he worked at Watford and QPR. ‘You feel like dogshit and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you had offered him up, after seeing him as a centre half, Ken would have had none of it. It just so happens he saw him have a worldie. I was there, and I could see him thinking: why haven’t I been told about this kid? When that happens, and a manager sees something he loves, you are powerless.’
Mel, my mentor, was pursuing a pet project, Jack Butland. The teenaged goalkeeper had been sent out on loan to Cheltenham by Birmingham City, who cherished him as an indigent would treasure a winning lottery ticket. The received wisdom, that Butland was destined to emerge as the most viable competitor to Joe Hart at international level, needed the reality check of constant assessment. Southend was an entirely different environment from Switzerland and Colombia, where Johnson’s interest in the goalkeeper had been piqued. This would be the ninth time he had personally monitored his progress.
‘I first saw him play in Nyon, with the England under nineteens, against Switzerland. When I got back I called Chris Hughton at Birmingham, who I know well. “You’ve got a goalkeeper on your hands,” I told him. “His shirt is out, his socks are down. He doesn’t look the part, but he’s got it allright.” He must have had a word because the next time I saw Jack, at the world under twenties in Colombia, I was really impressed by how he’d changed. He’d got taller. He held himself better. The shirt was in and the socks were up. He looked professional, an England player. I watched him four times out there, and he was outstanding.
‘That was a good side. I got excited, put a report in the system straight away and got a message to Damien. I did some groundwork, and arranged to meet Jack’s agent. We had a coffee before one of the Cheltenham games, and I got to know his deal. John Achterberg, our goalkeeping coach, and Alan Harper went to watch him. There are lots of rumours going around. Chelsea are interested, Man City, Arsenal, the usual suspects. Everybody’s been to watch him. I don’t know about other clubs, but we’re still on the fence. To us, he doesn’t come and catch the ball with conviction. He doesn’t come off his line and smash it away. He doesn’t come between the bodies and claim it. At the moment he looks hesitant. The one thing we hope is that this is a passing phase. The worry is that it is a real problem.
‘It is so difficult with young players. I was with Stuart Pearce at Wycombe the other night. Stuart told me he loved Jack to bits. That’s reassuring because of the respect I have for him. I had a great conversation with him about the development of the young ones. I threw names at him. I asked what he thought of Lewis Dunk at Brighton, the centre back who is interesting quite a few. Stuart’s had him in his under twenty-one squad but I don’t fancy him at all. I will still keep watching him, just because he’s young and a left-sided centre half, but he only ever kicks with his right foot. He’s not for me, but it was interesting to gauge Stuart’s reaction. In England, for Liverpool at the moment, it’s all about the recruitment of young players.’
Excellence in scouting, as in any other profession, involves the accumulation and application of knowledge. Johnson had acquired experience, over three decades, at clubs as diverse as Cambridge United, Crystal Palace, Fulham, Tottenham, Huddersfield and Newcastle. He was not a goalkeeping specialist, but had a rare insight into the complexities of the trade. He almost earned himself a niche, as the man who discovered Joe Hart:
‘You see a Gareth Bale and things work out well. There are other boys you don’t sign, like Joe Hart. Kenny Jackett was managing Swansea in League Two when I went to Tottenham; Frank Arnesen took me there in February 2005 from QPR, where I was chief scout. One day Ken called me and said, “Mel, there’s a boy at Shrewsbury in goal called Hart. You’ve got to go and see him, he’s fantastic.” So I went and really liked him. Frank had brought me in to get the best young players to Spurs and I told him Joe was one worth having. He liked the idea. Hans Sagers, Tottenham’s first team goalkeeping coach, went to watch him play at Barnet. He liked him, too, and we decided to go for it. Frank spoke to the chairman, and then spoke to Gary Peters, who was Shrewsbury manager. They wanted a million pounds for him. Frank said no.’
His instinctive laughter at the nature of the misjudgement provided an exclamation point to the tale: ‘Man City were always very, very interested. They got him for six hundred grand. It didn’t work in our favour, but that deal is a good example of how we get players. We build up a network of contacts, managers, other scouts, agents and coaches. I’m constantly scanning the internet. I know this is old school, but I also love a newspaper. I’m continually looking for information on players. You also need to be a talker to be in the game. You need to network. If you don’t, you’ll struggle to get back in when you are on the outside, looking in. When my manager friends lose their jobs I always tell them to get to games. A lot of directors ask us about coaches and managers. They want to know who is being seen on the scene. They ask who we would recommend for a job. The flip side is we also get a lot of managers calling us, regarding players. It is the usual stuff – “do you know so and so, what do you think about him, anything I should know” – but it makes the world go round.’
The read on Butland’s character was promising, despite his adolescent slovenliness. He was self-sufficient from the age of 14, insisting on making a two-and-a-half-hour train journey from Bristol to Birmingham alone, three times a week. He refused to burden his parents with the chore of driving him there, though it would have taken half the time. He spent all day Tuesdays and Thursdays training with goalkeeping coach Dave Watson, but still passed all his GCSEs, earning two A grades, six Bs and a C. His most difficult decision came at 16, when he gave up rugby, much to the disappointment of his father, whose own rugby career was ended by a car accident.
For the first half, at least, Butland would be a distant figure. Southend herded the scouts into two executive boxes in the left-hand corner of the main stand, between the by-line and the edge of the penalty area. They had the feel of monastic cells, and were obviously difficult to market. Two rows of chairs were set out before a grimy picture window, but only those seated at the front had an uninterrupted view of the far end of the pitch. Even then, those on the right-hand side of the box had to squint through a forest of supportive posts.
Ewan Chester, Birmingham’s chief scout, popped in to pinch a team sheet and assess the level of interest. A dapper man in a dark raincoat, he had spent more than 20 years in two spells at Rangers, where he was trusted implicitly by contrasting managers, Graeme Souness and Walter Smith. In this context, he was a cross between an auctioneer and a foster parent. His presence re-assured Butland that he had not been abandoned. He would also provide immediate feedback to Hughton and Watson on the value of Birmingham’s investment. ‘We watch Jack every game,’ he said. ‘We know he has got a big chance. He’s the best young goalkeeper I have ever seen. He’s unbelievably mature, as near a certainty as you can have.’
The first box was full. Ours, for some reason, contained only one other scout, Paul Dyer from Queens Park Rangers. A voluble character, in a full-length black leather coat, he had the bearing of a former military man; his gaze was firm, his posture was positive and though he smiled readily there was latent aggression in his eyes. At 58, he was making a living as a cabbie, and trying to deal with an enduring sense of betrayal. Colchester United, the club to which he had devoted the majority of his working life, had not only cast him aside. In his eyes, they had also defiled his dedication, by using it against him, at an employment tribunal:
‘I did everything for that club. I was there twenty three years and Paul Lambert blew me out. That meant nothing to him, and everything to me. Colchester is my club. I played there. I painted the roof of the stand during that long, hot summer, seventy-five, seventy-six wasn’t it? Imagine the heat that roof radiated. It was unbearable at times. I drove the minibus. I managed the reserves. I swept the dressing rooms. I put up the hoardings on the side of the pitch. I made them nine million on players when I was chief scout. What did that get me?’
The searing experience of having a claim for unfair dismissal rejected. The tribunal decided his employment began when he signed a contract in 2006 and not in 1991, as he argued, when he became part of the backroom team. He disputed the club’s insistence he was merely a volunteer for those 15 years. Colchester’s redundancy procedures were criticised as being ‘flawed’ but this was deemed insufficient to allow the claim. Dyer had rejected £5,800, and then a further £2,000, from the club during the arbitration process. The price of service had a physical dimension; like many former footballers of his generation, he suffered badly from arthritis:
‘I was a bite and scratch midfield player. They used to say Kevin Beattie at Ipswich was hard. I used to have him in my pocket. Alan Hunter always used to say I was the biggest pain in the arse he played against. I put it in every day, every game. I kept fucking going. When I was injured they put morphine directly into the joint to stop the pain. My knee was like a building site. I told them to clear out all the shit and still went back for more. I was in more pain than I had ever been in my life.’
There was a telling wistfulness to his reminiscence, which ended as the teams filed out to a welcome which failed to match the hysteria of the public address announcer. An athlete’s career is like a phantom limb, which can still be sensed by an amputee. It leaves a spiritual void. Dyer, jolted back into the present by proximity of the kick-off, didn’t need to ask about the nature of Johnson’s mission. It was of marginal significance since he was concentrating on full back Lee Hills, who had been loaned to Southend by Crystal Palace for the last two months of the season. The word was that he would be released in the summer. ‘He’s worth a look,’ the scout rationalised. ‘The Premier League might have gone for him but Mick Jones, who knew him at Palace, reckons he’s not bad.’
Johnson leaned forward slightly in his seat as he focused on the far end of the pitch, where Butland was a light blue speck. ‘I’m waiting for him to come off his line and catch it,’ he muttered as the home side, emboldened by the early dismissal of Cheltenham full back Sido Tombati for a lunge on Michael Timlin, put the goalkeeper under pressure from a series of set pieces. Though let down by his defenders, who allowed Kane Ferdinand to score with an unchallenged shot, five yards out, in the 28th minute, he was failing to command his penalty area. A night which had begun badly was destined to get much, much worse.
Butland’s first major error extended Southend’s lead before half-time. He made the elementary mistake of failing to get his body behind a swerving shot by Ryan Hall. The ball nestled in the centre of the goal in tacit admonition of the blunder. Unnerved by the calamity, the goalkeeper became increasingly static. ‘This is why you go to games,’ Johnson said, to Dyer’s murmured approval. ‘Jack needs to be getting plenty of games, playing for a team with something to play for instead of a meaningless development squad. Cheltenham want to go up, and he’s with old pros who’ll tell him: “Sort it. We want to win this for the fucking bonus.”’
Butland, last off at the break and first to return, was now in our eyeline. His features were suddenly distinct. It was disarmingly simple to read his body language. Bizarrely, he released his nervous energy by bouncing up and down in the team huddle which presaged the second half. It was an arresting sight, almost as if he was trying to trigger a hokey-cokey, but the levity of the moment was soon lost. Southend should have been 3–0 up almost immediately; Butland was rooted to his line as Eastwood, in his first game at Roots Hall for five years, missed a simple header from a Hills cross.