Route to the top
T he strange thing about the last time England played Scotland, in November 2014, was that a generation of English footballers who had never known any of the old rivalry between the two countries seemed to feel in their bones that something was at stake that night at Celtic Park.
Before that game, the last time that England had played a friendly north of the border, in May 1989, the last of the Home Internationals, Wayne Rooney was three years old. One of the two oldest in the team in 2014, when Rooney scored his second goal to make it 3-1, the England captain launched into the exuberant tumble he once did as a Tigger-ish teenager at Euro 2004.
Afterwards the Football Association staff were surprised at the buoyancy of the players’ mood on the short flight back down south, and if the game that started lifting the post-2014 World Cup finals depression was the win away to Switzerland, then this one in Glasgow sealed the transformation. Perhaps for those English players who had featured in the youth international scene it stirred memories of their adolescent battles against Scotland junior sides.
Aside from that pair of home and away friendlies in 2013 and 2014, England do not play Scotland unless they happen to be drawn against them in Uefa competition, as in 1996, 1999 and this current World Cup qualifying campaign. The 1989 friendly was the end of an era of 44 post-war games and Friday’s game will be just the sixth since then – but the parting of the ways does not end there.
In 2015, the FA made the decision to tell Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that it was not interested in playing the Under-16s Victory Shield competition, ending an annual tradition that went back to 1946. The England team had either won or shared first place in the Victory Shield in all but two of the previous 16 years and many of the best English players had got their first taste of international football as schoolboys in the competition.
On Friday the 2016 Victory Shield was won by England’s long-term replacement in the competition, the Republic of Ireland. The FA, however, has very different plans for the England Under-16s, who are off to Rio de Janeiro this month to play two games against their Brazilian counterparts for what the St George’s Park hierarchy hopes will be a trip that broadens horizons.
It is one of those bold moves in elite sport that does not always go down well with those who prefer things the way they were, and may yet expose some of the shortcomings in England junior players. Last month, the Under16s team played the Val-de-Marne tournament in France and lost all three games, to the United States, France and Russia.
Winning is preferable but at junior levels does it really trump experience, or progress? England junior teams have won tournaments before – they would win the Victory Shield most years and rack up some big scores along the way – but one of the key tenets of the England DNA document devised by technical director Dan Ashworth and coach and player development head Matt Crocker was to give players experience of new styles of football.
England have never wanted for big, strong boys who can dominate opposition at junior level but what happens when the physical advantage disappears? At under-16 the boys are now introduced to a possession-based game, championed by the England DNA document, under coach Dan Micciche. The FA is philosophical about losing games if it can be shown that long-term strides are being made in technical proficiency.
The FA has precious little time with the boys who represent their junior teams, elite development now being exclusively the preserve of the leading clubs and their category one academies established under the Elite Player Performance Plan. How does the FA add value for one of the big Premier League side’s best academy teenagers who knows that he will be signing a lucrative pro deal on his 17th birthday? The FA believes two games playing for England in Brazil is one way to start.
The under-17, under-19 and under-21 age groups at international level are all obliged to compete in Uefa qualifying tournaments. The challenge for the FA since it launched England DNA has been to find something interesting for the under-16s, under-18s and under-20s to do when they are free from those restraints every two years. The under-20s as a result are off to South Korea to play their hosts, as well as Nigeria and Iran.
Will it work? England have found ways to be mediocre despite all sorts of changes wrought upon the game at junior level, but something had to change.
The official line is that English boys get enough exposure to British players in their club academy and development team fixtures but the reality was that the Victory Shield was often too easy for many of the English players, against nations with much smaller pools of talent.
As for Scotland, there is a consensus that their development programme has improved in recent years, but for it to continue to advance it needs more funding from the Scottish Football Association, which has suffered financially from the senior team’s failure to qualify for major tournaments. It is there that national associations generate the most revenue, through television, prize money and commercial deals, which drives the development.
Since Brian McClair quit as performance director this summer, after just one year in the job, the Scottish FA has been casting around for a replacement, with John Parks, the head of development at Celtic until he left the club last month, one possible candidate.
Celtic’s 13-year-old Karamoko Dembele played for Scotland in the Victory Shield this month, and despite the difference in age, not to mention height, showed what an exceptional prospect he is. Born in London and raised in Glasgow, he will also have the option to play for England or Ivory Coast, his parents’ country of origin. He will have every big English club academy after him when he turns 16.
If he fulfils his potential at Celtic, and with Scotland, Dembele will undoubtedly have a pathway through to both first teams, which is the advantage that all but a few young English players enjoy.
That privilege is beyond the gift of the English FA, who can take their boys to Brazil in the international break but spend the rest of the season keeping their fingers crossed that clubs in the richest league in the world give the English kids a chance.
England have found ways to be mediocre despite all sorts of changes wrought on the junior game