Authors: Michael Calvin
‘I absolutely hated him . . . Action Man legs . . . I expected more . . . I’m all over the Yellow Five . . . good talker, great weight of pass, super timing of runs . . . is he all hair flicks and no output? . . . liked how hard he worked, when the modern game tells them just to look good . . . he’s buzzing for it, very polite . . . wants to score ugly goals . . . if we have to work with chicken shit, and turn it into chicken salad, we will . . . he’s as ugly as fuck, can’t run, but he’s a battering ram . . . this kid is going to be a joy to work with . . . he’s got a long drive back to Scotland, let’s give him something to be happy about.’
Thirteen players were offered contracts, subject to passing a medical. In addition to Grant, the early stand-out was Cameron Edwards, an Australian also released by Reading. A technically accomplished central midfield player, comfortable playing on the left in a 4–3–3 system, he had an impressive range of passing and hidden reserves of character. ‘He’s been sick as a dog all week, and didn’t want to tell anyone,’ revealed Gilligan, after Edwards had been unanimously approved. ‘Are we all happy? Lot of work to be done with that lot. Lot of work can be done with that lot.’
Once decisions had been taken, the mood eased, and the human dimension of the exercise became clear. Whittle and Tillson, two of the previous season’s success stories, had attended the trial, hungover from the previous night’s leaving party. Before collecting their belongings from the hall of residence, they asked Gilligan to pop into the room they shared. They were awkward, but handed him a bottle of wine, with the message ‘We couldn’t have done this without you.’ The old pro, a survivor of a hard school, was touched:
‘The simple act of saying thank you goes a million ways down the line for me. I don’t want someone to shower me with gifts and cards and stuff like that, but I want them to be appreciative of everybody who has played a part in their lives. There are some terrific scouts out there. There are terrific managers, coaches and development staff. But no one individual makes a player. Without the component parts, without the human jigsaw, it wouldn’t happen.
‘For me, the biggest accolade is to have a player shake your hand and spend time with you. I never signed Jobi McAnuff at Wimbledon, but I did a little work with him there that had an impact. He’s a terrific young lad, a very, very talented player who has been a credit to himself and the Premier League. I was doing some work for a specialist sports college some time back and needed a guest footballer to open a playground at a little junior school. He was playing at Watford, my old club, and I asked him if he would do it. He came out of his way, drove himself there, and spent two hours longer with the kids than he was meant to. I rang him up afterwards to thank him and he said, “No problem, absolutely no problem at all. I loved it.” They are the kind of things for me, that matter.
‘Modern players have so much done for them. I understand the principle of stripping everything else away so that they can concentrate on football, but we also need to teach kids how to speak to people. How to look people in the eye, how to shake their hands, say good morning. They will need people skills, because not all of them will make it. Is their agent going to get them a job when they are out of the game? Are Mum and Dad going to answer the interview questions for them? You can’t grunt and groan your way through life. The fact you’ve been a footballer doesn’t mean someone is going to give you a job.
‘There are millions unemployed. These boys are in the rat race with everyone else. They need to match the skills their contemporaries have, coming out of college or university. Football is a fantastic vehicle and I don’t want to take anything away from it; academies are a fantastic concept. But I also believe we can’t underplay the morals and values of our young men. We must make them responsible for their own actions in life. If we do so, they will be better for it. There is a massively holistic aspect to what we do.
‘The kids that come to us are broken. We patch them up and put them back together. We try to educate them, so that they have a Plan B. If I was to take a penny for every time I’ve said well done to a kid this year, I would be a millionaire. You have to build them up, but remind them about the bread and butter of the trade they want to enter. The real world, of professional football, involves making sure your manager doesn’t wake up in a cold sweat, having selected you for tomorrow’s team. I tell the lads the game has just let them out on loan. We’re going to get them back in at some point. That might take two weeks, two months or two years, and first, they are going to have to help themselves.’
While Gilligan was preparing to entice scouts, by outlining a programme of 43 matches against development teams from the UK and Europe, smaller clubs were drawing up contingency plans to repel them. The probability of poaching was preoccupying Shaun O’Connor, in his role as Head of Academy Recruitment at Brentford. He intended to make life as difficult as possible for scouts from September 2012, when they were allowed unfettered access to training grounds as part of the controversial EP3 strategy. His idealism, however, was tempered by realism. He had little option but to acknowledge he was a product of the pitiless climate in which he was operating:
‘It’s getting desperate, absolutely desperate, out there. I’ve no doubt some of my boys have been tapped up. Let me find a piece of wood before I say this, but it looks as if we have done quite well. I left Arsenal’s under tens with some outstanding young players, scouted at six and seven. I don’t have their money, but I’m convinced we can be OK. Miguel’s new academy group, the under nines, are great; sixteen boys, so we have two eight-a-side teams.
‘We’ve studied Everton and Liverpool at that level. Both great clubs, but Everton are doing the better job, between the ages of six and twelve. They do it properly. They are sharper, ruthless. Chelsea are starting to do the same thing. I’m telling my club to get in there early, get the best boys we can between six and twelve. If we see an under seven that we like, we’ll pull him out of his Sunday side.
‘I know people will probably not agree with this, but we will bring him in for three days a week. We work hard to build a relationship with the parents, and hope they will sanction a pre-agreement with us. We will give him full technical training and a game each week, but will try to hide him. We will give him one game out of London each month. We’ll play at least ten games in that sequence, against the likes of Liverpool, Wolves, Derby and Norwich.
‘The problem from the club’s point of view is that it is a big cycle. You are waiting for ten to twelve years for your work to pay off. I’d argue, though, that paying big money for fourteen or fifteen-year-olds is a much bigger risk. Take Sheyi Ojo, who has cost Liverpool two mill. I’d have wanted seven or eight exhaustive reports on him before doing anything. He’s strong and powerful at the moment, but how will he develop? How will he deal with the physical and mental challenges?’
The question was pertinent, because O’Connor had something, someone, special to protect. He, too, was 14. Talent usually announces itself with a fanfare; all Courtney Senior required was an instinctive flick of a shiny black boot with fluorescent green studs. It came, one evening, towards the end of a small-sided Under 16 training game. His body had the pliability of plasticine as he received an overhit pass, to the left of the goal. He controlled the ball, feinted to his left in the same sinuous movement, and flicked the ball past the goalkeeper with the outside of his right foot.
The urge to make eye contact with O’Connor was overpowering, just as it had been with Mel Johnson, when Paulo Gazzaniga made The Save at Oxford. I mouthed a name: ‘Jermaine Defoe’. Ose Aibangee, Brentford’s head of youth development, was standing alongside us. He whistled through his teeth. ‘That,’ he announced, in hushed tones, ‘is a centre forward. Pure instinct.’ The barber’s son, discovered playing in a park in Carshalton by scout Carl Davey, quickly became a rumour made flesh. Chelsea and Manchester City led the stampede to take a look.
Not for the first time, Brentford were in danger of being too good for their own good. Senior helped their Under 15 team win the Milk Cup, the most prestigious pre-season tournament in youth football. They beat a Liverpool side containing Oji 5–4 on penalties in the semi-final before defeating Everton, winners in four of the previous five seasons, 2–0 in the final. To put the achievement into perspective, Brentford finished 23rd out of 24 sides when they made their debut in the competition in 2010.
‘Every club’s looking at Courtney now’ O’Connor confirmed. ‘There has been talk at first team level about this kid, so we have to be very careful. Well, we can’t be careful, to be honest. At the end of the day, if the biggest clubs want to get him, they’re going to get him. Their money tends to talk. I don’t want to give a player away for any amount of compensation, because it doesn’t really compensate, does it? But I have to accept the way of the world. If a Chelsea or a City come along after twenty games and say he’s going to be a player, then we’ll probably sell him.’
MARK ANDERSON HAD
played his last pop anthem, after two decades as an occasional DJ. He had handed in his hard hat along with his responsibility for a £1.5 million construction contract in Wandsworth. He was back in football on a full-time basis for the first time in 11 years, as Brighton’s head of youth recruitment. His calling card was a letter, encased in a silver frame, which had pride of place in his new open-plan offices at the American Express Community Stadium:
On behalf of Academy Director Frank McParland and Kenny Dalglish I just want to thank you for your part in the signing of RAHEEM STERLING from Queens Park Rangers. As you know, there was a lot of interest from very big clubs in RAHEEM and this makes a massive statement on behalf of Liverpool Football Club, with regards to recruitment in England. Let’s go and find the next one!
The letter, signed by David Moss, the former Luton winger who is the academy’s chief scout in the UK, was inevitably a source of scorn and ridicule. The coaches and scouts with whom Anderson worked were conditioned to make fun of his artlessness and enthusiasm. It was the sort of perverse gesture of respect in which football specialised. The target of their stage-managed cynicism was so exultant he was beyond caring.
Liverpool’s scouting system was imploding; though Mel Johnson persevered, other key figures, Steve Hitchen and Stuart Webber, had left, to join Queens Park Rangers, where Mike Rigg, Manchester City’s former technical director, was working alongside Mark Hughes. Anderson, who had also been approached by Charlton and West Bromwich Albion in the dog days of the Dalglish regime, understood the dynamics of Brighton as an upwardly mobile football club.
He was a solicitous host, spending an hour on a tour of the £93 million stadium which was a monument to the ambition of owner Tony Bloom, a professional gambler and poker player who gloried in the nickname of ‘The Lizard’. Anderson was eager to reveal everything from the contents of the home dressing-room refrigerator (cherry isotonic drink) to the number of industrial tumble dryers in the equipment room (four, in an Aladdin’s cave of kit for the new season).
Brighton had been squatting at a municipal athletics stadium for twelve years, between 1999 and 2011. Players changed in Portakabins and fans sat, without protection from the elements, in temporary stands, borrowed from the golf Open Championship. They had moved from Palookaville to Paradise. Anderson’s 18-hour days, juggling football with his day job, as a senior site manager for a construction company, were over. He merely devoted 18 hours a day to becoming the scout he had always wished he could be:
‘There are not many hard core scouts out there. I have been doing this for twenty-seven years. I’ve got used to a culture of listening, observing and obsessing. I am going to produce. That’s what I do. I got Raheem into Liverpool. They signed seven of my boys over the last three years. If someone tells me about a player I am there.
‘I reckon I will bring someone into the first team here within eighteen months. I’ve done that wherever I have been. Bob Pearson, the great old chief scout at Millwall, used to tell me, “You’ve got to put your name on a player.” I’m not scared to do that. I am forty-seven this year. I wanted to get back in, full time, before I settled for just ticking along.
‘The building work was a means to an end, to be honest. Football was, and is, my passion. I was doing silly hours, getting on site at six in the morning so I could be off at games, later in the day. I’d be getting in gone midnight, doing two thousand miles a month on the road. It’s so dangerous. There are so many times when you are sitting there behind the wheel, and you feel yourself starting to go to sleep. You can’t stop it.
‘But, once I knew this job was coming up, I took time to recharge. I will be full on. I will be focused. I will be at it from early morning to late in the evening, seven days a week. I won’t stop. My family understands. This is about me now. It’s a major life decision. I might have dropped money to do it, but this is all I ever wanted to do. I was at one of the biggest clubs in the world, but this one is growing, going places.’
News travels fast. Anderson’s role, as outlined by Brighton’s director of football operations, David Burke, had a rare scope. Scouts at clubs run on a shoestring could not conceive of the luxury of an academy with 55 full-time employees. They were quickly on the phone, confiding their availability. Shaun O’Connor was one of the first to contact him, but had a different agenda.
‘Shaun was great. “I know what you are up to,” he said. “I will not let you move an inch.” I’m like him, another grafter. This will be done properly. The parents will be brought in for chicken and chips. The triallists will be treated well. The first night any boy trains with us he will be in full Brighton gear. I’m not the sort to be there one minute, and gone the next.’
Anderson stopped to take a call from a Ghanaian agent, touting a 15-year-old boy. It was a fleeting insight into another world. The agent owned 70 per cent of the player and his sales pitch was brutal: ‘He was telling me the boy would cost me next to nothing, but he wanted a massive sell-on fee. I try not to get involved with people like that. I want boys without problems.’