Stop obsession with foreign imports and trust our clubs to nurture the next Bellingham
DURING those long days of Covid lockdown four years ago I would sit at my office window and watch a teenager dribbling a football in and out of cones on the family driveway across the road. He would do shuttle runs, too.
His father would sometimes watch but the boy clearly knew what he was doing. Turned out he was in Manchester United’s academy and was following a detailed programme provided by his club.
I spoke to United’s academy head Nick Cox about it at the time and he explained that his staff were determined to ensure their players were occupied and focused as much as possible during those confusing and scary weeks, when they were unable to come to the club.
More important, though, were the phone calls that were regularly made to boys and their parents to check on their mental and economic wellbeing.
At one stage, there was a Zoom call by then-first team manager
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. ‘ We care about their football progress,’ Cox explained to me back then. ‘But first and foremost we need to make sure they are OK.’
I thought about all this on the way home from Wembley on Tuesday night, because young Kobbie Mainoo would have been 14 when lockdown started.
He was in United’s system back then, just another hopeful boy. Maybe he was guiding footballs through cones outside the family home in Stockport too. Maybe he picked up the phone one day to hear his academy coach on the line asking if he was all right.
This is not just a Manchester United thing, it’s an academy thing. It’s a modern English football thing. This is the way it is now and that is why when we watch Mainoo easing the ball neatly and progressively through the England midfield in the rain against Belgium, we should all feel lifted for all kinds of different reasons. This is the future of the game and of our young footballers and it looks and feels healthy.
In that England team on
Tuesday we watched Jude Bellingham, Phil Foden, James Maddison and others.
Before the game, Bellingham and Foden offered their jackets to their mascots as the rain began to fall during the national anthems. The TV cameras picked it up, but it was not done for show.
Afterwards, Maddison paused before talking to the media as he wanted to watch the Wales penalty shoot-out on somebody’s iPad. When he was told it had gone badly, his first thoughts were for Tottenham team-mates Ben Davies and Brennan Johnson.
We care first and foremost about what these lads do for us on the field. We want them to win. We have waited a long time and once again we feel as though England have an opportunity this summer in the European Championship.
We don’t expect these young men to live perfect lives, that is unrealistic. There will be blemishes, but they have been placed on the right path.
That’s the important bit and as the Premier League continues to grow as a domestic competition of unrivalled quality and drama, it is impossible not to be heartened by the fact that our own young players remain at the heart of it.
England manager Gareth Southgate, who has also name- checked Archie Gray at Leeds as another one to watch, does worry that one day there may not be enough of them. He points out that the number of homegrown players at top clubs has never been lower. We should
THE care about this and listen to him.
influence of certain agents at some of our clubs is a concern. Are all players being bought for the right reasons? No. Are there too many coming from around the world who are not better than what we can produce ourselves? Yes. Can the search for a quick fix by managers and sporting directors get in the way of sound judgement? Undoubtedly.
Still, it was impossible to watch young Northern Irishman Conor Bradley hustle the Scotland defence out of possession and then hammer the ball into the top corner at Hampden on Tuesday and not see the creed of his Liverpool football education running through his every act.
Some players are born to play at the highest level, while others need nurturing. Foden, for example, had to wait for his body to catch up with his brain. That has not been a problem for Bellingham and clearly not for the prodigious Mainoo. Maddison, meanwhile, needed some emotional maturity, as did Jack Grealish.
Our academies, in which so much time, money and thought have been invested, are now programmed to tick these boxes. Who knows what lockdown was like for Mainoo at United or Bradley, then 16, at Liverpool? Their clubs knew, though, and that was the most important bit.
England may well not win the European Championship. It is always worth remembering there are other talented teams too.
But beneath the money and self- interest of our domestic game, good things are happening. We should be grateful for it.
MARTIN O’NEILL is favourite to become the new chairman of the League Managers Association, but there is a hope from within the organisation that Gareth Southgate may one day consider the role.