Southampton Youth Development...Old Kosky re Youth

[Macmoish]

Yes I am jealous...And still waiting for QPR to take the steps to start serious youth development. Year after year after year... Take away Parrett, O'Brien, Sterling (maybe a couple of others)...After all the hype we get every year, where are the young stars.

GUARDIAN/Dominic Fifield

Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain is another Southampton academy success story

The Saints may be in League One but as Manchester United come to town their academy is the envy of Premier League clubs

Those at Southampton know the drill well enough by now. A youngster they have developed over a prolonged period breaks into the first team and duly thrives, blazing a trail through the division to ensure that a trickle of scouts becomes a flood at St Mary's. The rumoured interest from the elite is eventually formalised with those at the very top offering considerable sums to accompany pledges that the player's "development will be furthered" at the higher level.

For Theo Walcott and Gareth Bale, read Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. The 17-year-old midfielder will confront one of his high-profile suitors tomorrow afternoon when Manchester United visit the south coast in the fourth round of the FA Cup. Arsenal and Liverpool will perhaps be unnerved, given that Sir Alex Ferguson will be able to state the case for a move to Old Trafford, in person and so close to the transfer deadline.

Southampton have publicly pledged to retain a player with whom they first worked when he was seven. "We're not trying to sell Alex," said the manager, Nigel Adkins. But when it comes to promoting their burgeoning talent the League One club's youth development programme is simply too good for its own good. At some stage, whether before Monday's cut-off or not, another bright young thing will fly the nest.

The sale of Oxlade-Chamberlain, like those of others who have moved on in recent times, will leave some supporters frustrated, the club's coffers replenished and a sense of pride burning among the academy coaching staff. United may have had their golden generation and Arsenal a number of impressive graduates in recent seasons, but Southampton are a phenomenon when it comes to youth-team scouting and development outside the top flight. They have always had the mindset to justify that reputation, from the days when Jason Dodd, Francis Benali, Matthew Le Tissier, Jeff Kenna, the Wallace brothers and Wayne Bridge came through to the time at their centre of excellence in distant Gateshead when Alan Shearer first caught the eye.

The crop of players that have sprung from Southampton's modern-day academy might have sustained the club had the seniors not slipped out of the Premier League, but the Saints' approach still offers a blueprint that other clubs of their size should surely follow. A squad's worth of graduates from the Staplewood academy are flourishing in the top two divisions while Southampton attempt to earn promotion from the third. Their under-18s, bolstered by over-age players, are second in Group A of the Premier Academy League, ahead of Arsenal and 11 points clear of Chelsea. This suggests that another wave of talent is about to break.

Last April, Les Reed, who was previously the technical director at the Football Association, was recruited to head the revamped football development and support centre at Southampton and he has restructured and tweaked the set-up. The club's chairman, Nicolas Cortese, says "the strong foundation" provided by the youth set-up will be key to the club's return to the Premier League.

Saints fans may wince to acknowledge it, but much of the academy's success can be put down to Rupert Lowe's first spell as chairman. The philosophy that was put in place in the late 1990s was European in concept and owed much to Lowe's admiration for everything Arsène Wenger was achieving at Arsenal.

"There's an anti-Lowe lobby out there, but Rupert created this dynasty of players," says Malcolm Elias, who was lured by Lowe from Swansea to take charge of youth recruitment, alongside the academy manager, Huw Jennings. The pair now work in the same capacity for Fulham. "His big thing was 'developing our own'. He put in the infrastructure, updated the training ground, and should be hailed rather than chastised for what he did.

"We had a strategy – a no brainer – to develop homegrown players in the academy, people like Adam Lallana, Andrew Surman, Nathan Dyer, and to buy in 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds. Rupert gave us the green light to buy Theo [Walcott] for £1,000 from Swindon, Leon Best and David McGoldrick from Notts County, Mike Williamson from Torquay, Dexter Blackstock from Oxford.

"Kenwyne Jones came over with WWW Connection, a club side in Trinidad, and played our academy side. We won 6-0 with Walcott running riot, but we thought Jones had something. West Ham gave him a trial too, but once people came and saw the coaching and support mechanisms we had in place, it didn't matter who we were competing against, whether it was Arsenal, United or Chelsea. The lads' parents allowed us to do what we thought was right for their sons. They trusted us. Chamberlain would have seen what was happening ahead of him. His father [the former England winger] Mark was a coach there and could see the standards that were being set."

Lowe says: "The model aimed at providing a proper structure to turn out clever players. The first part was to get the best boys in, which we did, hoovering up the best kids out there. Then we went out and hired Georges Prost, a French coach who I had a lot of trouble convincing the board was the right man for the job. A lot of this success can be put down to Georges's attention to detail. Prost, a super man, taught [under-18s] technique. It's not rocket science. If you can't get that through to the players when they're young, you can't make them into players, but the key was always to get the right kids.

"We screened them not for football ability – that is not necessarily the key at that age – but for intelligence and athleticism. You can teach them the rest. If they're not clever and not athletic, you'll find it hard to push water uphill. We spent money on the facilities – an indoor sports hall, a wonderful gym, banks of computers for the lads to use and for us to assess them on – and bought a local hotel, Darwin Lodge, for £250,000, where the boys lodged. We installed Julia Upson to run it, and she was like a mother to them. We made sure their diets and education were right, that their entire lives were stable. By the time I left, Southampton had the whole sweep necessary to produce not only players of quality but players who are also decent people."

There was clever use of the Bath satellite academy – half of Southampton's catchment area is effectively in the sea – to extend the club's ability to recruit at a young age. Bale, spotted at the age of nine when playing for a Cardiff boys' team, Civil Service, in a tournament in Newport, started on the Bath campus before moving to Staplewood, where he was Walcott's room-mate at Darwin Lodge. Training sessions would see the pair confront each other on the flank, while Jones and Best, the scorer of a hat-trick in the Premier League this season with Newcastle, unsettled Matthew Mills (now of Reading) and Martin Cranie (Coventry) in the centre.

"Those individual battles drove the standard up all the time," Elias says. "If the boys weren't at their peak, they were exposed. They drove each other on. I remember us playing Arsenal during their long unbeaten run, back in 2004, and Georges went up to Wenger and said he'd beat him to 50 games unbeaten. He did, too."

The junior sides, overseen by Steve Wigley and Prost, set the standard. When the Frenchman returned to Lyon following a bout of throat Cancer in 2007, his five-year spell had seen the Southampton under-19s crowned national champions in 2004 and the under-18s win their league in 2005. More significantly, a swathe of youngsters had made the step up into the professional game.

Southampton's misfortune was an inability to combine the focus placed on the youth set-up with the maintenance of a Premier League side. The youth team reached the FA Youth Cup final in 2005, the year the first team slipped out of the top flight, leaving the club's prized assets vulnerable to the vultures. "You have to pay tribute to Southampton because they had such a good academy but just couldn't take advantage of it," said Wenger. "That FA Youth Cup final couldn't grow as a team and, unfortunately for them, they became big players somewhere else. The fact is that a smaller club can't keep the good players for long enough to take advantage of it."

Yet the club's spiral down the divisions – and consequent financial problems – has not affected their reputation at academy level. The club is now stable and the current owners can trust the foundations that were laid down.

"It's my belief that there are still boys within the system there who have benefited from what was a good environment," Elias says. Players such as James Ward-Prowse, Jake Sinclair and Lloyd Foot could yet follow Walcott, Bale and Oxlade-Chamberlain by drawing the scouts to St Mary's. The ultimate academy continues to bear fruit.

www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/jan/28/southampton-alex-oxlade-chamberlain

[Macmoish]

The Guardian/ The Secret Footballer

Pundits like Andy Gray? Why the players couldn't care less

That many football pundits don't even try to scratch beneath the surface, despite knowing what it takes to win a match at this level, is deeply annoying

Andy Gray, former Sky pundit Anyone can navigate a giant iPad, sliding faces of famous players around with their pinkie while throwing out rubbish phrases. Photograph: Rex Features

What if Sky Sports offered me Andy Gray's job? Not a chance. Let me tell you something, football pundits are universally despised by players and not just because at some point in the past they would have been on the receiving end of criticism themselves.

It doesn't matter what you've done in the game, where you've played, what you might have won or how much money you earned – pundits are held in the same regard by players as female assistant referees once were at Sky.

And while on that subject, prepare to be disappointed. While I found the whole episode with Gray and Richard Keys at Molineux cringeworthy, inside the world of football nobody is particularly bothered. Don't interpret that as evidence that players are condoning Gray and Keys for their behaviour. It's more a case that most of my team-mates would have no interest in listening to anything pundits say in the first place.

There's no obvious reason why those sat on the sofa are thought of in such low terms, but it may have something to do with a sense that they are going against the inner sanctum that we pretend we are a part of. Perhaps, subconsciously, it tugs at those still playing, who realise the ex-players know things about them that they probably wish they didn't.

Their new position of influence over millions of people is a little uncomfortable for some, I'm sure, and their failure to go the extra mile when analysing matches can also grate.

Switch to our world and the level of detail that goes into games still, to this day, amazes me. Every player has his own script, what to do, when to do it, information on the player he's up against, including weight, height, age, strengths, weaknesses, even what that opponent is likely to do when the ball comes to him in certain situations. We memorise every single set piece, where we have to stand, run and end up. We even memorise this for the other players so we know where everyone else will be at any given time.

You know that pass when you say to yourself: "How did he spot that?" Often he didn't need to; he knew the player would be there because, the night before in the hotel, he read about the runs he would be making.

It's exactly the same pass after which sometimes you might find yourself saying: "Who was that to?" The receiving player either forgot to be there or was taken out of the game by a tactical manoeuvre by his opposite number.

Football at this level is very chess-like, maybe not to those outside of football but certainly to those inside. I sometimes wonder whether it's more enjoyable playing lower down the leagues. After all, who wants to play chess?

With top-level football being so complex, it is very difficult to deconstruct a live game within a couple of minutes of it being over, and because of this the "analysis" is usually reduced to goals and individual performance. But the fact that many pundits don't even try to scratch beneath the surface, despite knowing what it takes to win a match at this level, annoys me. It's the trivialisation of what we do by people that we used to call our own and, more importantly, deprives the viewer of some very interesting tit-bits that would, I feel, add to the entertainment.

Anyone can navigate a giant iPad, sliding faces of famous players around with their pinkie while throwing out phrases like "Third man run" and other such rubbish. What particularly riles me is when you hear a pundit or co-commentator say something like, "I can't understand, Martin, why Drogba is not on the post here. That header would have fallen to him and if I'm Petr Cech I'm saying: 'Go on son, clear that off the line for me!'"

The fact is corners are routinely cleared by a man stationed on the six-yard line, exactly where Chelsea position Didier Drogba. If somebody scores inside that post it is for no other reason than a player having lost his man. That is the mistake. If there is a player on the post he will clear one, possibly two shots off the line a season. If that same player stands on the six-yard line he will probably clear 100 corners away over the course of the season.

The worst thing, though, is when this dross gets into popular culture and my friends start saying stupid things to me like, "We should have a man on the post, our manager doesn't know what he's doing", just because it sounds like the right thing to say. It's such an easy way of analysing that it infuriates me. It's lazy and it takes you, the viewer, for a fool. But, then again, Sky is an expert in creating a villain.


www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/jan/29/secret-footballer-andy-gray-pundits

[Macmoish]

And a Ben Kosky piece from three years ago

QPR's "Discarding" of Home Grown Talent: Perspective of Kilburn Times' Ben Kosky-

Ben Kosky/Kilburn Times - January 30, 2008 = What about tomorrow, Flavio?

JANUARY 2008 may become renowned as the month when Queens Park Rangers transformed beyond all recognition - but not necessarily for the better.

At first glance, everything seems rosy in the Loftus Road garden. Rangers have reversed a decade of penury by embarking on a breathtaking buying binge during the transfer window.

Few would question the wisdom of adding players of the calibre of Akos Buzsaky, Rowan Vine and Fitz Hall to the squad, even though some of the other recent signings look superfluous and overpriced.

But it's all too easy for Rangers fans to be carried away by the influx of expensive players and ignore the alarming trend with regard to movement in the opposite direction.

A few years ago, the playing staff included several promising youngsters nurtured by the likes of Gary Waddock and Joe Gallen and knocking on the first team door.

Tragically, we will never know how Ray Jones might have progressed - but what about Scott Donnelly, Shabazz Baidoo, Pat Kanyuka and, even more recently, Kieron St Aimie?

None of them were wanted at QPR. Donnelly and Baidoo seemed to lose enthusiasm after being frozen out by John Gregory, but both had shown enough ability to suggest they were far from being lost causes.

By contrast, Kanyuka performed well under Gregory until injury ruined his season - and having missed the first half of the current campaign for the same reason, he was surely worthy of a chance to prove himself under new boss Luigi de Canio.

Apparently not. Nor was St Aimie, handed a pro contract only six months ago and now discarded without more than a single substitute appearance in the Carling Cup.

All this sends out the message that QPR are a club that no longer places any importance on homegrown talent - because they can now shell out a fortune for other teams' youngsters instead.

One of those is ex-West Ham forward Hogan Ephraim - who, in a recent interview with the Times, stressed the need for Rangers to copy his old club's blueprint and make sure they are planning for the future.

Ephraim said: "Fans love nothing more than seeing one of their own players breaking into the team. If QPR can get on that road as well as bringing in quality players from elsewhere, it'll be a great mix."

Fat chance. Neither Flavio Briatore nor any of his fellow investors have said one word to indicate that they have any intention of putting funds into the Centre of Excellence - or, for that matter, regaining the club's Academy status.

Even Chelsea, the detested enemy who Rangers fans dream of deposing one day, were building up their youth facilities at the same time they were lavishing £24m on Didier Drogba.

That's because they plan to be a serious player in world football for many years. It looks as if QPR's plan is to keep stockpiling as many players as possible, then buy some more next season.

Some may see that as ambition. Actually, it's better described as greed, recklessness and stupidity.

Remember the pride we felt when Gerry Francis, Clive Allen, Peter Hucker, Alan McDonald, Kevin Gallen and many others broke into the first team to carry our hopes and dreams?

Remember those days well... because it looks as if they're gone forever. Kilburn Times