‘We had 47 teams all using the same grass’
The tarmac base was still drying last night at Wallsend Boys Club. After a six-year “tooth and nail” battle for support, the club that found Shearer, Carrick and Beardsley is finally getting an allweather pitch.
“We are one of the lucky ones,” said Steve Dale, the chairman, as he inspected the Tyneside club’s new floodlights. “The grass roots is in crisis, for many reasons, especially the further north you go. The weather these days kills the clubs over winter times. It’s not so much the snow, it’s the fact we seem to be in this era of global drowning.”
If anyone was due a favour from football’s elite it was Wallsend, but when their dilapidated playing hall was knocked down in 2012, the club was told not to hold their breath.
“Even with our records, and the number of professional lads we’ve produced, we had to fight tooth and nail to get this far,” said Dale, 57. “Nobody’s ever knocked on our door and said, ‘How can we help you more?’ It’s always the other way round.” It would take the approval of Newcastle United to ensure they could secure funding support from the Premier League and Football Association foundations. For other less successful clubs, it is not so easy.
Dale added: “We lost 12 weekends last season because of the rain. For a club that’s trying to grow, and do as much for the girls as for the boys, we went from 17 teams using the grass pitches back in 2010. Last season, we finished with 47 teams all using the same grass. We simply couldn’t continue to function without getting an artificial pitch. It’s as simple as that.”
Wallsend’s problems are mirrored across the land. Only one in three grass pitches is of adequate quality and one in six matches is called off every week due to poor pitch quality, while 33 of 50 county FAS are without their own 3G pitch to stage matches.
Last season, 150,000 matches for 300,000 teams were cancelled – the equivalent of five million playing opportunities having been impacted this year because of poor facilities. The decline of the grass roots is particularly felt among younger teams. The number of 11-aside boys’ teams fell by 3,500 between 2011 and 2016 – from 29,713 to 26,235. Meanwhile, the cost of hiring a pitch has risen by 1,000 per cent over two decades.
“It’s a different era to when the likes of Beardsley or Carrick were coming through,” said Dale. “You had more unorganised games happening where you get a few lads or girls together, but now you never see a spontaneous game of football taking place on a patch of land. When I was a kid, you got to school early, played in the yard, then stayed at school afterwards to play.
“But now we get the kids being dropped off for training and the parents stay to watch. My dad would never come unless I was in a final. But it’s a different culture. Maybe there are safeguarding issues, but it’s a nonsense.
“We are there for the children, not the parents. The clubs are also getting the players too young. We would rather they got them older like they did with Michael Carrick, at 13 or 14. Let them have their childhood with the old models of centres for excellence. They seemed to work. They were better for the English game.”
Cash-strapped local authorities are also affected. A source at Bristol City Council said: “Our sports development team used to have 50 people covering education, health, exercise and facilities. I think there’s about eight now.
“The shift came about through local government austerity measures and losing posts is obviously a major way of saving money. So it’s just a different, more fragmented set-up now.”
Back in the North-east, Dale said Wallsend have secured their 3G pitch only because they were able to raise £250,000 from a housing development deal with the council.
“We’ve done well but it wasn’t easy,” he said. “We lost our premises at Station Road, which was an indoor five-a-side pitch which really was the reason our players were so comfortable on the ball.
“It was a confined space indoors and the ball could be coming at you from a pipe, from a staircase, anything, so the likes of Beardsley –