Authors: Michael Calvin
The temptation to take stock was irresistible. More than 100 guests had come to pay their respects. Griffin was surrounded by managers he had worked for, scouts he had worked with. The trade to which he had dedicated himself was supposed to be on its death bed. Everyone knew its vital signs were weak, but prayed they would remain viable. Too many good men were being sacrificed in the name of innovation, and their names were recited, like a lament for a lost legion.
Steve Gritt, sacked as Bournemouth chief scout, and replaced by a video analyst. Russ Richardson, sacked as Bristol City chief scout, and effectively replaced by Jon Landsdown, the owner’s son. Brian Greenhalgh, surviving on mileage rates at Huddersfield after Watford’s new owners decimated their scouting department. Keith Burt, sacked as Nottingham Forest’s head of recruitment by Kuwaiti owners who also seemed set on operating a manager of the month policy. The list went on and the word went out. The Nowhere Men had a duty to help their own.
Mel Johnson was the first to respond. He successfully recommended Mike Robbins to Gillingham manager Martin Allen, a fellow guest of the Griffins. Robbins was another victim of the cull at Queens Park Rangers, a former army cook who had also scouted for Exeter and Norwich. ‘He called me as soon as he was topped,’ said Johnson. ‘He didn’t know what to tell his missus. Mike’s a nice guy who wants to get on, and Martin told me he was looking. It’s good to get him fixed up.’
Johnson’s empathy was understandable, because he had benefited similarly, by being offered a lifeline by Newcastle when released by Tottenham. Graham Carr gave him breathing space and a broad brief, working in France and England. He respected Johnson’s experience, liked him as a man, and appreciated why he eventually chose to move on to Liverpool. Newcastle’s chief scout offered the same respite to Greenhalgh, whom he asked to work the Northern circuit. They were of comparable vintage and character. Greenhalgh insisted: ‘I like a laugh, but I will not be compromised on integrity. The younger ones, with their numbers, don’t know what it is like to listen to that voice in your head when you see a special player.’
Meanwhile, the analysts were taking stock. They gathered at a conference on the Eastern seaboard of the United States, on March 1 and 2, 2013, in which the keynote debate was entitled ‘The Revenge of the Nerds’. They were addressed by Nate Silver, the so-called ‘Dork Jesus’, who made his name in baseball sabermetrics before morphing into a political blogger who correctly called all 50 States and the District of Columbia in the 2012 US Presidential election.
They weren’t having things all their own way. The NFL’s ‘anti-technology rule’ banned coaches from using any electronic devices – iPads, laptops, phones or calculators – during matches. Offensive co-ordinators were forced to use pen and paper to calculate in-game statistics. A forum bemoaned the short-termism of English football, the difficulty of proving a return on investment, and the challenge of creating trust. In the words of Chris Anderson, a behavioural political economist from Cornell University who was one of the pioneers in the field of football analytics, ‘going 0 to 100 in data is scary to lots of clubs’.
Anderson reinforced his message at a Sports Analytics Innovation Summit, held in London three weeks later: ‘In many ways, I think football analytics has stalled. Inside football clubs, analytics has sort of ground to a halt. There was a lot of excitement about Moneyball but I don’t think we’ve got super far with that. That’s a truth we have to face. Football analytics is in danger of becoming another fad.’
Little wonder, given the conservatism of the British game, and the flights of fancy undertaken by the likes of Daniel McCaffrey and Kevin Bickart. They were neuroscientists, who suggested future recruitment policies in sport would be shaped by analysis of heart rate synchronicity amongst teammates. In layman’s terms, they argued players who enjoyed playing together, played more effectively together. Their affinity could be measured through motion charts and biological data, assuming privacy issues could be overcome.
It was, of course, tempting to dismiss this as rom-com drivel, in which the eyes of the protagonists, a hulking centre half and a demure second striker, met across a crowded dressing room. Yet McCaffrey and Bickart supported their case by citing an experiment involving married couples and their ability to co-operate to solve a puzzle. Partners whose heart rates were most in sync experienced lower levels of conflict, solved the puzzle faster and, perhaps with a nod to Griffin, were more likely to have long and happy marriages.
The only interpersonal dynamics which concerned Griffin involved the relationship between the Supporters’ Trust, which ran Wycombe Wanderers, and the League Two club’s bank manager. The sale and lease back of their training ground, for a knock-down price of £350,000, promised to ease the immediate threat of administration, but the trust were still asking fans to donate £10 a month to a fighting fund. Griffin had been on the verge of retirement when Gary Waddock was sacked earlier in the season, yet remained to help Gareth Ainsworth mould a successful team out of veterans, loanees and teenagers. Fourteen first team players earned a total weekly wage of £3,000.
‘No one really knows how bad it is,’ said Griffin. ‘I was very, very down when Wadds left, and I thought about jacking it in. I’d known him since he was thirteen, when I tried to take him to Brentford on schoolboy forms. You build up relationships with your managers. I’ve known Gareth since he was a kid of seventeen. That was the reason I stayed. I did say to him that I wouldn’t have had a problem if he wanted to bring his own man in. But if he wanted me, I felt I owed it to him to stay.
‘You feel for young kids trying to make their way. I’m not going to lie to you. Sometimes I wonder what I am doing, still in the game. I ask myself, why? The problems here are serious. But then I look at the young players, and their eagerness to get a life. I look at Gareth, still playing at thirty-nine. He can be a hard man, because football is a hard business, but he is so bubbly and infectious. It’s a love affair. I think it helps that he comes into the team and does everything he asks the young lads to do. He tells them: “As long as you do it for me you will always be in my side.”’
That sense of mutual trust and respect bred an affecting intimacy. Football was a strange fusion for Griffin, a surrogate family which included his own flesh and blood. His nephews Peter and Steve were scouts. Their brother Gary was renewing his managerial reputation at Yeovil. He revered his uncle’s knowledge, and had never forgotten his gesture, in leaving Crystal Palace to assist him when he secured his first managerial job at Cambridge United. Griffin, too, remembered:
‘I left Palace for eighteen months. Ron Noades let me go, and he promised to take me back. He knew what Gary meant to me, and was as good as his word, the day it went wrong for Gary at Cambridge. I enjoyed it there. I was never afraid to look for players at the lowest of the low. I went to watch a boy play for Christchurch. He was seventeen, ginger hair, a spotty college boy playing in the Wessex League in front of four men and a dog. The next day I said to Gary, “I’ve just found you your centre half for the next fifteen years. This kid might be out of the ordinary.”
‘And he was. It was Jody Craddock. I’ll always remember him coming to see Gary. He was very much the student. He had cut-down shorts and a pony-tail. After we’d signed him and all the formalities were done, he walked out of the room. Gary said, “What have you done to me? Are you sure this is right?” He was in our first team within four weeks. He’s had a great career in the Premier League with Sunderland and Wolves. He’s doing some coaching now, though they tell me he wants to paint for a living.
‘Gary always tells me, “You’re such a mug for not getting a percentage of everything.” PeopIe say I should go for the money, because everyone else makes money out of the deal, but I enjoy looking at a player progress and saying to myself: yeah, I started him off. Not too many of the players keep in touch, and they don’t realise the boost to your ego it is when you see them doing well. I follow every one of them really closely. If I bump into them, which I frequently do, they will always make a fuss.
‘I remember a few years ago I saw Stan Collymore at the football writers’ dinner. He was way across the hall. He saw me and walked through thirty or forty people to throw his arms around me. That was nice. I’ll always remember that. Things like that stick. I think they all spoil me if they see me. A couple of scouts I helped along the way do it, as well. One of them, Alan Watson, works for Manchester City. A very well educated man, who worked for me for about ten years. When he went to City he sent me a wonderful box of wine. He sent a note which said: “This is just to say thank you for everything you do. Other people don’t realise how I got this far in my career.” That was lovely. That was brilliant.’
Commercialism was continuing to accelerate change. Scout7 attempted to increase their market penetration by offering clubs free video scouting packages for the second half of the season. The major data companies, Prozone and Opta, were responding strategically to the needs of technical scouts like James Smith at Everton by offering statistics of greater depth, sophistication and relevance. These involved the timing of high-intensity sprints, the location and number of shots on goal, and the metrics of a killer counter attack. The pursuit of legitimate business aims threatened jobs and livelihoods of men who lacked an ability to fight back.
‘It is all anyone talks about at the moment,’ admitted Griffin. ‘It’s absolutely impossible for an analyst to do the same job as an experienced scout. You can’t see players on a screen, and have an appreciation of what’s going on thirty, twenty or even ten yards away. You couldn’t possibly take a player just from the internet. Someone’s eyes have to be involved. What happens to that trust you need between a chief scout and a manager? How can he go to him and say, “This one is worth a look, gaffer” if he is not certain himself?
‘Facts and figures have their limitations, but I know the world is changing. I had a phone call recently asking me to find a chief scout for Crystal Palace. They wanted a younger man, an IT specialist who could also go to games and scout. I helped them find Tim Coe, who is a good lad. He’s very bright and has been out on the circuit. They sent me a dozen bottles of red wine, which was nice, but it was worrying that they should insist IT skills were more of a priority for them than a scout’s eyes.’
The complexity and consequences of change were familiar to Ray Clarke. We had first met on Valentine’s Day, 2012, in a lounge on the 38th floor of the Gherkin, the iconic skyscraper based on the site of the former Baltic Exchange in London. He was off to West Ham with his wife Cindy, whose champagne lunch was an apology for an evening spent waiting in the car park, because someone had reneged on the promise to supply her with a match ticket.
She smiled indulgently, and would while away the game reading. He was on crutches, following a hip replacement operation, but when he talked football, with his glasses pushed backwards through a full head of grey hair, he was bright, youthful and expectant. The ball was out, the delicately presented beef and duck wraps were pushed to one side, and the capital, spread beneath us like an architectural and historical textbook, was reduced to a peripheral blur.
Clarke was a pioneering player, a striker whose career began at Tottenham and encompassed successful spells in Holland with Sparta Rotterdam and Ajax, and in Belgium with Club Brugge. He returned to England to play for Brighton and Newcastle, before moving into coaching, initially as reserve team manager at Southampton under Graeme Souness. He was one of the first scouts to work extensively in Europe, holding international roles at Coventry, Southampton, Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Celtic.
He had spent two years attempting to set up a Football Scouts Association, under the auspices of the League Managers’ Association. A constitution had been prepared. Clarke liaised with the Football Association, and supervised ticketing arrangements for scouts at the Olympic football tournament, before the dead hand of bureaucracy threatened to throttle the life out of the idea. It was an opportunity missed, because the welfare of scouts was regarded with increasing indifference.
‘Scouts are treated with no respect,’ said Clarke, more in sadness than in anger. ‘We don’t matter to too many people. There’s no security. No one knows what we do, and no one cares. There are a lot of people out there struggling. They’re doing it for the love and no money. The old school chief scouts are getting bombed out. I can see a lot of errors being made in recruitment because of that. You can’t just push numbers at people.
‘In Holland the scouts have a saying: “you have to smell the tulips”. Statistics are all very well, but they don’t give you what the traditional methods give you. You are out there, looking at everything from a player’s movement to his mentality. You sniff the good ones out. People might listen to that, and turn round and say “oh, you’re just one of those old farts” but we know what to look for in any given situation.
‘Sometimes it is a question of body language. Rio Ferdinand isn’t a natural defender, Nemanja Vidic is. He puts his head into a challenge, while Rio turns his away. The head is so important, because it determines body shape. Sometimes it is about gut feeling. You can see the pictures in a player’s brain when he receives the ball. It can take less than a minute to make your mind up about someone. Once you are sure about him, you get in there early. We did that at Newcastle with Tim Krul, the goalkeeper who cost us only two hundred and twenty thousand euros as a sixteen-year-old.
‘Sometimes it comes down to basic background work. Players work at certain clubs. Fernando Torres was successful at Liverpool because they were brilliant on the counter. Once Steven Gerrard had the ball, Torres was on his bike, hitting the channels. The ball invariably arrived. The reason why Torres is failing at Chelsea is that they do not play with a high enough tempo and the ball doesn’t come quickly enough.’