JJ – the Blues’ starlet who was born to play
MOST 17-year-olds who find themselves parachuted into the maelstrom of a Championship match feel as though they have come a long way in a short time.
Not Jordan James, who has been coming a long way for a very long time, travelling from Hereford to Birmingham City’s training ground at Wast Hills at least three times a week since the age of seven.
Often it was up to five times a week, with his dad – ex-Hereford and Burton defender Tony – doing the lion’s share of the driving as JJ finished his day at school, jumped in the car and headed up the M5 in time to start training at 6pm.
Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
“On a good day you could do it in 60-70 minutes,” said Tony. “On a bad day, it could be a couple of hours.
“As he grew up and got older around the time he was getting ready for GCSEs, 15-16, he started having day release up there on a Wednesday, I’d travel up before work in the morning, then pick him up after work in the evening.
“I can’t even imagine the number of hours I’ve sat in the car waiting for him to train, turn around and go back home, sometimes getting in at nine o’clock at night.
“A more accurate estimate would be the amount of money I’ve spent on fuel, we are into the many thousands of pounds, I would have thought.
“But we never resented it. His grandparents helped and as a family we love football.
“I always said to him, if there was ever a time where he turned round to me and said ‘Dad, I don’t want to do it any more’, I would have said ‘Fine, no problem’. I never pressured him into anything. It was off his own bat.”
After all, Tony knows what pressure football can bring. Having started out in Cardiff’s youth set-up he ended up signing scholarship forms with West Brom, after a friendly for the Baggies at Lilleshall one evening became more official.
He ended up playing most of his career with the Bulls and the Brewers, mostly in the Conference but also in League Two, before retiring six years ago.
From his own career the 43-yearold knows journeys in football are rarely straightforward and that behind every corner lies a setback and on every seemingly straight road sits a bump.
Progress can either be rapid or painfully slow and while it seems JJ has come from nowhere, he’s long been well-thought-of in the Blues academy. Yet 18 months ago, before the pandemic upset everything, few would have predicted a first-team debut this soon.
Indeed, it was only around the time of his GCSEs that Jordan’s small stature meant he was playing ‘a year down’ with younger players.
“Just so he could express himself a bit more and do things he couldn’t do in his age group,” Tony says. “He was fine, we all understood it, Birmingham were great with him. They could see something in him and were prepared to spend the time to let him develop.”
Nevertheless, he was given a twoyear scholarship with his peers only to find lockdown sent him back to Hereford and his development was done online with Blues’ coaches or with a ball at his feet with his dad.
Then things started changing. Growing.
“Since Covid he has improved so much in such a short space of time you could see his confidence growing.
“He started to develop physically,’’ says Tony.
““Once he started being able to use his physicality a little bit more he suddenly changed. Once they got back in training, playing matches, he changed overnight.
“He is not an outwardly expressive person. But he is very inwardly driven, he has got a proper drive in him to be as good as he can be. He understands football, he has lived at football and training grounds since nineten years old. It seems stupid to say but it feels like he was born to play.
“He is not a football nerd, who would sit down and watch loads on the telly, but he loves playing it.
“When he is on the pitch he is a totally different person, he is very confident, very aggressive in his play, he will make a challenge, he has got a little bit of needle about him, mirrored with good technical ability.
“Look, I know I’m his dad. But I’m also his harshest critic.”
Not even JJ’s biggest fan would have predicted a first-team call-up.
The focus this year was on trying to break into the Under-23s set-up, maybe have the odd session with the seniors and then try to do enough to secure a first professional deal.
His first exposure with the first team came as Gary Gardner found himself suspended and players like Alfie Chang and Tate Campbell, who might have benefitted ahead of him, were out injured.
Jordan was summoned over to train with the seniors and impressed head coach Lee Bowyer.
“Football is crazy, you can’t predict it,” Bowyer said. “He has been around us, trained with us and done really well. When you see that from a 17-year-old kid, the stuff he is doing, you keep him around.
“I think he has got good potential and I think I can improve him a lot, so from now on he will be training with us – whether he’s in the squads or not. Even if everyone is fit he will be around us now.”
Not just around the first team – but in it. When the James family found out he would be in the match-day squad against Bristol City, a whole entourage made sure they were at St Andrew’s that night.
As Jordan Graham picked up a calf strain, on came his younger namesake for a five-minute cameo. All the miles and hours had been worth it.
“The way the game panned out it was perfect,” Tony says. “Leading 3-0 the game was over, for him to go on under no pressure in front of 16,000 people, it was a really, really proud moment. I was really impressed with how he coped with it.”
At 8am the next day he was back behind a desk doing an education module at Wast Hills. But that wasn’t it, He also came on against Hull – with Gardner once more on the naughty step – and helped Blues see out a 0-0 draw at Coventry after Ryan Woods was sent off.
He then produced a man-of-thematch display in the 1-0 win over Blackpool, belying his years, and got in another 90 minutes in Saturday’s defeat at Millwall.
Bowyer likes what he sees – a little bit of himself as a teenager.
“He has a lot of energy and wants to run forward,’’ he says. “A lot of midfielders nowadays don’t want to run forward, they want everything to feet, look pretty – but he just ticks a lot of boxes for me. I like what I see.
“It’s difficult to say things like ‘He reminds me of myself’, but I was 17 when I first broke through and there are some similarities.”