For a man with so many great memories from football, Sir Trevor Brooking has surprisingly little in the way of memorabilia on his office walls at the FA’s Soho Square HQ. But there are two items that do catch the eye.
The first is a tribute to his two spells as caretaker manager of his beloved West Ham – one defeat in 14 games – and the second is a framed newspaper article, “Brooking’s mission to find the English Fabregas”.
At the end of our interview with him - about Burton and the challenges facing the English game - we asked Brooking about his search for an Englishman who can play like Arsenal’s midfield matador. His response was so illuminating, so heart-felt, I am going to quote him verbatim.
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“Cesc Fabregas is a great example of a football brain, a thinker, a decision-maker. When you play for a good team and you’re in possession of the ball you probably have half a dozen choices where you play the ball,” he enthused.
“Fabregas always chooses the best or second-best option, where it’s going to hurt the opposition most.
“Sometimes the most hurtful ball is a simple five-yard pass, nothing flash or tricky. But sometimes a player doesn’t want to make that pass because it doesn’t look good.
“What we need is somebody who understands the choices and can instantly prioritise: that’s the one that is going to hurt.
“And if you end having to take the sixth choice, which is your square ball out of trouble, well, you might have to play one or two of those. But all too often the easy ball is the option we take, and if you take that option too often you won’t become the player you could.
“We should encourage youngsters to think about the risk option because if you are comfortable in your technique the risk option isn’t a risk. Arsenal knock the ball into people who are marked all the time but they weight it away from the defender and pace the pass the right way.
“I would never have received the ball at West Ham if my team-mates waited for me to get free. It’s not a problem as long as the person knocks the ball into you properly.
“It’s about having the confidence to knock the ball around because you know the people you’re playing with, how you’re going to knock the ball and how they shape up.
“You’re all on the same wavelength. At the moment we haven’t got enough on that wavelength.”
No, Trevor, we haven’t. Not unless 40-yard balls aimed at Peter Crouch/Emile Heskey/Alan Smith’s head count as a wavelength (although they certainly come with frequency).
For me, the key line in the FA director of development’s answer was the one about encouraging youngsters to “think about the risk option” which he qualified with the caveat “if you are comfortable in your technique the risk option isn’t a risk”.
That, of course, is the real secret to the pretty patterns that Fabregas orchestrates at the Emirates. He and his talented cohorts can instantly kill the ball (any ball), get their heads up and move it on accurately with any legal part of the footballing anatomy. And then move intelligently to find space to do it all over again.
They didn’t learn that at London Colney, although they clearly work on it there. They learned that in the park, playground, scrubland or back garden of their childhoods.
Those football fundamentals were then honed under the nurturing gaze of junior coaches in Belarus, Cameroon, Czech Republic, France, Holland, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Spain, Togo... almost anywhere apart from here, really.
Listening to Brooking talk about the urgent need for England to go back to the beginning in order to go forward reminded me of a comprehensive in east London that has made a name for itself as a production line of rugby union talent.
Kids arrive at that school, aged 11, from football backgrounds. They are broken into small groups, taught the basics and encouraged to play attacking rugby. Most importantly, they are banned from kicking the ball out of hand.
They are then thrown into a fiercely competitive playing schedule against most of the South East’s best (and mostly fee-paying) rugby schools.
The no-kicking, run-from-anywhere approach is not relaxed until the fourth year, by which time the early massacres (not helped by the almost suicidal refusal to kick) have usually become small defeats.
The best opponents on the playing schedule often keep their noses in front for the next year or two. But by the time those same players progress to their school’s first team things have turned drastically around.
Armed with superb handling skills, instinctive flair and a philosophy of relentless attack, the comprehensive boys wipe the floor with their classically coached rivals.
I know this because I was there. I don’t mention it to brag (I was a very small cog in the machine) or out of any out-dated notion of “class war”. I mention it because English football needs to do something very similar, and soon.
That school, Campion, became the first state school to win the prestigious Daily Mail Cup in 2001 (and nearly won it again a year later) and they have produced two full internationals, one Lion and at least half a dozen other professionals. Ten of the current U16 team are on the books of Guinness Premiership clubs.
Brooking, and many others who realise what is happening at the grass roots, know that the vast majority of our footballers just have not been taught the basics properly.
That is why they struggle to find first-team opportunities in the global village teams that now populate “our” Premier League, which is fast becoming as relevant to English football as Wimbledon is to English tennis. It is also why the England national team will never match the accomplishments of “English” club sides.
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Why aren’t our footballers taught the basics properly? Well, here it’s a case of our greatest strength – our will to win – being our greatest weakness too.
To return to our rugby example, Campion’s kids were told winning didn’t matter for those first few years. Learn the game, you’ll get them later. The entire programme worked towards the same goal and with the same philosophy.
The win-at-all-costs mentality in English football costs football in so many different ways. The best-paid coaching jobs exist at the top of the pyramid. How do you get there? You win. How do you win? You play winning football.
I don’t know if you’ve ever watched young kids playing winning football. It isn’t pretty. The best player is usually the biggest player and the game often hinges on which keeper can kick his goal kicks further. Things don’t get much better when these kids take their kick-and-rush grounding to teenage football.
I haven’t got all the answers, and if I did I certainly couldn't outline them all here, but I am going to suggest that English football listens to Brooking, takes the intensity (and that means you too, mum and dad) out of kids' football, focuses on building blocks as opposed to medals and invests a bit of money on getting the best coaches working at the level where they will have the most impact.
Let Fabio worry about 2010. I think it’s time the rest of us took a slightly longer-term view.
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