Sir Trevor Brooking: Working for the future of English football

‘In tight areas our midfielders lost possession and in the attacking third, one against one, we lacked the ability to open up defences and the final ball wasn’t good. When we didn’t qualify for the 2008 European Championship it triggered a debate, but then Fabio Capello came along, we had a successful couple of years and it all went on the back burner.’

Well, not here it didn’t. With three boys of school age, some of us have been banging on about the parlous state of youth football since first standing on a touchline watching a son, who is now a strapping 14-year-old, playing his first game as an under eight.

The root of every problem that Brooking identified is there almost from the start, which is why there remains a gaping hole at the centre of his treatise, however well intentioned. For nowhere does the director of football development mention pitch sizes or team numbers as a factor in youth football; and this is where the rot sets in.

Back in November 2007, I challenged Brooking, and any youth football administrator who fancied it, to a game. The goals were to be 3.057metres (10.029ft) high and 9.174m (30.098ft) wide; the length of the pitch was to be 150.4m (165 yards) and the width 112.80m (124 yards), making the total playing surface 16,800m sq; the penalty area alone would stretch for 20.68m (23 yards). Despite the increased dimensions, the teams would remain 11-a-side.

 
 
Expanded by ratio, this equated to the travesty of the average
11-year-old playing on a full-sized pitch, a corruption of common sense
that occurs throughout the country each weekend.

Within days, Brooking’s office proposed a chat. I took along Rob, No 2
son, who was a 10-year-old goalkeeper playing for Redbridge district on a
man’s pitch at the time. He wished to know why so much of his goal was
physically impossible to reach. It didn’t seem fair.

Brooking was nice, understanding, but talked like a man who was remote
from the problem, rather than poised to conquer it. He talked
committees, and professional game boards, and Rob soon bore the look of a
boy who couldn’t believe he had skipped double geography for this.

Brooking knew something had to be done, so why didn’t he do something?
Now, almost three years on, he has. He has produced a booklet called
‘The Future Game’ that, in essence, leaves youth football mired in its
past.

 ‘Is there
anything in there on pitch sizes?’ I asked the gentleman at the FA.
‘No,’ he
replied. ‘That’s a rather abstract concept.’

But it
isn’t. It becomes finite, the size of the pitch, if Brooking makes it
so. Were
he to instruct that it should be made relative to the size of the
players,
instantly we would have a better quality, more technical game.

Ever notice
the size of the pitches kids mark for themselves in the playground or
the park?
Not big, are they? Kids don’t want some gruesome slog against the odds;
they
want a quick, fun game with lots of action and lots of goals. The faster
the
better, in fact: what do you think rush goalie is all about?

What is
an entirely abstract concept is the vague notion, advanced by Brooking
and
others, that we should play like Holland or Brazil, France or Spain,
Germany,
Argentina, or whoever wins the World Cup this summer.

I’ve
heard a million of these theories and they founder at the same stage:
teach the
Ajax method as much as you like, but if on Sunday the wind is against
you, the
pitch is sodden and the halfway line is 50 yards away, your 11-year-old
goalkeeper will barely be able to get the ball out of his own penalty
area, so
the opposing forwards will push up and camp on the edge of the box, the
wide
players will close down your full backs and you will be trapped.

When
small boys play on an oversized pitch, an opposition goal-kick is often a
better attacking tool than a corner. It is a total perversion of the way
the
game is meant to be played. Each one of the failings Brooking identified
in the
young England teams can be traced back to issues in junior football.
Those vast
expanses of boggy, uneven parkland are where the agricultural central
defenders
with scant technique are created.

If you
can’t get the ball out of your own half, the quickest, easiest taught
solution
is not to coach the kids to knock it about like Barcelona and bamboozle
the
opposition – because that would take years and a far superior pool of
talent
than is going to be available to a typical under 11 coach – it is to get
your
two biggest kids, stick them at the back and tell them to lump it
forward.

This is
how we have produced generation after generation of clumsy defenders,
the type
our opponents want to have the ball because they know possession will
soon be
conceded.

If
Brooking then wonders why, one on one, English forwards lack the ability
to
finish or open up defences, it is because they do not have sufficient
experience of this facet of play.

Manchester
United, who know a thing or two about nurturing young talent, made a
study in
this area and reported that small-sided games in restricted space
produce
significantly more passes, crosses, scoring opportunities, shots,
one-on-one
situations and goals. The optimum game for increasing the technical
ability of
five to 11-year-olds is four versus four. Obviously, Sunday clubs cannot
be run
on that basis but there is no reason why seven and nine-a-side football
should
not be standard until the age of 14. 


Heads you win: Brooking and Fabio Capello help
launch the FA’s £200million boost for grassroots football back in 2008

Hockey is
an 11-a-side sport with many similarities to football, but the majority
of
games played by children of school age are seven-a-side on smaller
pitches. The
alternative is that technique would go out of the window and
circumstances
would merely reward the biggest, earliest developers, who could hit the
ball
farthest.

Brooking
told me that his generation played on full-sized pitches, too, and the
experience did not harm their technique. Yet this is not entirely true.
For a
start, England have won a single World Cup, in 1966, so for all the talk
of the
superior technique of previous generations, it has remained consistently
inferior to their European and South American counterparts.

Indeed, a
recent interview with Brooking opened with an anecdote about a match he
played
for England in 1977 when Johnny Rep, the great Dutch right-sided
forward, began
mocking the quality of the opposition minutes into the game.

Also,
Brooking’s generation had more open spaces to play football in an
unstructured
environment: in the road, the alley, at recreation grounds that are now
housing
estates. This freedom developed skill in the raw.

These
days kids are coached to death by the dad of either the best (if he
wants the
glory for his son) or the worst (if he wants to ensure his son is
picked)
footballer in the team, often with one eye on the league table, plus an
audience of belligerent parents.

 

 

 

As Brooking
surely accepts, there is absolutely no reason why English footballers
should be
inferior. There is no genetic predisposition to lack of flair, so it
must be a
failing in our system, in the way our game is coached and run.

Watch a
group of little kids playing football anywhere in the world and they
look the
same. It is ridiculous to imagine our seven-year-olds have less skill
than tots
in Spain. It is what happens next that holds them back and while
Brooking has
some bright ideas, he does not go far enough.

He has
the power to change youth football in this country almost overnight, yet
refuses to exercise it. An edict restricting pitch sizes, goal sizes and
team
numbers up to the age of 14 would be a radical start.

Instead
what is being proposed is a very English revolution, in that it will
look nice
on an occasional table and you can always serve tea off it.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1279484/MARTIN-SAMUEL-Sir-Trevor-Brooking-realise-kids-lost-land-giants.html#ixzz0oPOUCgiH

 

The question to answer, how can a
noted Daily Mail journalist ( I buy the paper everyday to read him)
after meeting to discuss junior football with Sir TB leave unaware of
futsal?

Webmaster