No Hunger In Paradise Page 16

  His survival instincts were honed when he fled Liberia, via Côfe d’Ivoire and its capital Abidjan, as a political refugee in the early nineties. He settled in Streatham, worked night shifts in a factory making gas meters, and studied at the Open University for a year before enrolling on a full-time degree course at Westminster University during the day.

  He chose criminality as his subject because he was disturbed by the demographics of the drug trade on local streets, and had decided to do a master’s degree at Leicester when he was bundled into a toilet by his factory supervisor. The subsequent lecture seemed to summarise the self-generating pessimism of a community stigmatised by the casual acceptance of crime and institutionalised racism.

  ‘When I was in Streatham I would always get stopped near the bus garage in the high street and be offered drugs by black people. That seemed to justify the slurs and made me question why. My supervisor at Sweet Meters was from Saint Lucia. When I told him I was leaving to study he said, “You are a black man. You’ll never get a job you want in your life.” That was my trigger point, my motivation, my challenge.’

  While at Leicester he was mentored by Professor Martin Gill, a security management expert, and inspired by the resilience of a fellow student, Chris Moon. A former British Army officer who survived capture by Khmer Rouge guerrillas, Moon lost the lower parts of his right arm and leg while clearing landmines for a charity in Mozambique. He has subsequently specialised in such endurance events as the Great Sahara Run and the 135-mile Death Valley Ultra.

  Albert’s lifestyle might not have been as dramatic, but his daily durability, as the only self-funded pupil in a class of twenty-four, was remarkable. Having set up his own cleaning company, he slept between ‘nine-ish’ in the evening and midnight, cleaned offices until 7.30 a.m., and then left south London to attend lectures in Leicester until mid-afternoon. He then completed a 280-mile round trip and returned to Streatham, where he studied in a local library for another four hours or so.

  ‘I am very, very conservative. Conservative with a small “c” – that’s me. I have this mentality that no one is better than anyone else. Rich people don’t have thirty hours in their day. Poor people don’t have ten. We all have twenty-four hours. How you use those hours, day and night, is what determines your future.’

  The ethos transferred to his sons, Aaron, Ashley and Alex, who were put through King’s Rochester, a cathedral school. All are high achievers; Ashley, the youngest, is an outstanding athlete and Alex, who gained seven A*s and three As in his GCSEs is aiming to study philosophy at Cambridge University. House rules are clear: in bed at 7.30 p.m. up until the age of 16, an hour later thereafter, with only occasional concessions.

  Aaron’s educational compromises began when, against his father’s instincts but at the insistence of a German PE teacher with links to Bayern Munich, he moved into organised football at the age of 10. His speed, as the Kent 100-metre champion, and his burgeoning physicality were obvious gifts; his understated nature belied leadership qualities, which came to the fore when he captained a public schools’ select team.

  Chelsea and Millwall made approaches, but he signed for Arsenal, his boyhood club, and moved to a grammar school at 11 because King’s were unwilling to release him from Saturday-morning lessons. Liam Brady, Arsenal’s academy director until May 2014, recognised Aaron’s lack of street wisdom, but understood his potential as an attacking full back.

  Football’s innate conservatism only became an issue when he achieved four A*s and six A grades in his GCSE examinations. After Arsenal released him – despite retaining faith when a knee injury cost him a season in the under-15s – his father came to an accommodation with Charlton, who agreed that he would be allowed to study independently in the evenings for a single A level, alongside the traditional BTEC day-release programme.

  Aaron was hardly stretched academically, and gained distinctions, the equivalent of A grades at A level, in his two BTEC modules. Coincidentally, on the day I first saw him play, in an under-21 game at West Bromwich Albion, he had just learned he had earned a B grade at A level in Geography, his supplementary subject.

  Albert was elated, since this triggered an offer to study sports management at Loughborough University from the autumn of 2017: he had his plan B, in case Charlton failed to take up the option of an additional year on Aaron’s professional contract. Albert’s sunny mood and pleasant personality enabled him to talk around some unusually accommodating security guards, who were initially insistent no spectators were allowed into Albion’s training ground.

  As it turned out the only other neutral observers were a South African agent, resplendent in the white trousers that seem de rigueur in his trade, a Dutch coach, and two random scouts. They would have gleaned little of enduring value from another example of the film-set football that passes as youth development in a rebranded Premier League Two.

  Both sets of performance analysts pored over their cameras and laptops on a hill overlooking the plateaued pitch. There were too many support staff, substitutes and coaches to cram into the transparent dugouts spread beneath them. The match, played in a strong crosswind and intermittent rain, had a familiar sterility.

  Albion have a locally driven youth policy, and genuine prospects in Sam Field, an England under-16 midfield player, and his international teammate Kane Wilson, a versatile full back. Tony Pulis, Albion’s first-team manager, spent most of his thirty-minute vigil with his coaching staff on the touchline taking a series of calls on his mobile. There was little sense of opportunity or continuity. Charlton, who took the lead and were denied an obvious penalty before drawing 2–2, were contrastingly cosmopolitan. They fielded a Bulgarian goalkeeper, an Australian centre half, a Dutch defensive midfield player, an Irish playmaker and a French striker. Aaron, well built, deliberate in possession and purposeful in his movement, was played on the left to allow a triallist from Manchester City to operate from his normal position, right back.

  There is always a transitional feel to development football; too often teams consist of passing strangers. The exception to the rule was provided by Charlton’s midfield player Regan Charles-Cook, one of three footballing brothers. He signed on at Arsenal’s Hale End academy on the same day as a 10-year-old Aaron Barnes in 2006.

  ‘That’s quite cool, isn’t it?’ Aaron remarked. ‘He’s like a little brother to me. We’ve spent half of our lives playing football together, and to keep going, at such a high level, is unusual. It is hard to have that type of relationship in football, because you see so many friends and teammates released. You don’t tend to keep in contact with them.

  ‘It is a delicate subject. You have your contract and although you are in a team environment everyone has their own objectives. Everyone is on a mission. You see people leave and they are a bit bitter about it. They are uncertain about their futures. It is a tough situation, and it is hard to talk to them about it.’

  The pair’s careers continued along parallel lines later in the year, when each made the first-team substitutes’ bench in the Checkatrade Trophy, a risible attempt to promote homegrown players through the admission of development teams from a smattering of Premier League academies, alongside Football League clubs. Aaron was shadowing one of Charlton’s few realisable assets, former England youth international Chris Solly.

  Aaron hides the requisite inner steel well, though he lacks the flip, supposedly knowing, attitude projected by his peers. He admits to being uncomfortable with bad language and his father praises Paul Hart, Charlton’s former academy director, for having the foresight to ‘place a coat of armour’ around him.

  Albert’s distinctive loyalty prompted him to leave a high-level job at the Home Office so he could devote more time to overseeing Aaron’s progress. He appreciates that internal dynamics tend to count against strong-willed parents at many clubs, but sees no reason to be apologetic about his protectiveness.

  ‘It took a long time for me to allow Aaron to be a footballer, because in the culture I co
me from, to be a footballer means you have no hope in life. I gave up my job to be as supportive as I can. So many parents don’t want to take the risk, but they want their children to succeed. You spend your life worrying about how to pay the bills, but my wife is working, so we live on only one income.

  ‘It’s a sacrifice that we all have to go through. I don’t want to do it half-half. I have the charity but my job is to take the pressure off Aaron, so he has the energy and mentality to concentrate on his football. I don’t care how much money I have. I don’t care what house I have. If my children are not respectable, then I’m sorry: I have failed. You make the decision to have children, therefore it must be your responsibility to provide them with a positive future.’

  Roger Hosannah, son of a British soldier based in the Ruhr, bases his parenting skills around the military discipline to which he became accustomed during his upbringing. He was a sufficiently promising footballer to be scouted by Schalke 04, but forged a career in professional basketball after taking up a scholarship at the University of South Carolina.

  Now back in the UK working as an intermediary in the sportswear industry following a spell, as head of clothing for T.K. Maxx, he is shepherding his son Bryce, a second-year scholar at Crystal Palace, down a similar pathway. He sees sport as ‘a tool to develop a boy’s personality’, and has maintained a healthy scepticism about football’s feudalism and self-importance.

  He accepts other parents might have succumbed when, at the age of 14, Bryce was told by Palace that it was in his best interests to transfer from Trinity School, part of the academically acclaimed Whitgift Foundation group, to Oasis, a school linked to the football club’s academy. His father, who had already defied club coaches by insisting his son develop multi-sport skills in rugby, cricket and athletics, was unequivocal:

  ‘No way. You don’t need to sacrifice your fundamental right as a parent because of what a club wants. That would be wrong. Too many parents have a sheep mentality. They fall prey to the bullshit. Boys get caught up in the bubble when there is nothing wrong with being different. There are too many automatons in the system, with structured thought processes. Everyone was telling me I was in the wrong, but I told Bryce, “You have to trust me.” Fortunately he has.’

  Roger knew the family pact he had engineered, which guaranteed his son a two-year window to concentrate on winning a professional contract if he was successful in his GCSEs, had reached fruition when he sat in his car outside Trinity School, one anxious morning in August 2015. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw Bryce running towards the vehicle:

  ‘I know my son so well, I could read his face. He had six A stars and three A grades. All those years working towards that point had paid off. We simultaneously burst into tears. It was the greatest moment of my life, because I had completed my first task as a parent. He is living on the edge as far as football is concerned, but he has a network around him.’

  Parental influence and ill-concealed concern about the depth of the talent pool is a global constant. While England’s newly reinforced inferiority complex was being worked through at St George’s Park, before the tribal rite of passage against Scotland at Wembley in November, I was assailed by the woes of Norwegian football in the unlikely setting of Skudeneshavn, a small fishing village on the island of Karmøy on the south-western tip of the country.

  Rain, presaged by a chill wind and dark frontal clouds, rolled in across the white-capped waves of Skudenesfjorden, and battered the warren of 225 white-planked wooden houses. Its familiarity did little to improve the mood of a standing-room-only crowd in the former public bathhouse. The locals had gathered to discuss the underlying reasons for the national trauma of conceding a World Cup qualifying goal to San Marino.

  The domestic game was deemed to be at its lowest ebb. The presence of three Norwegian players, Ronny Johnsen, Ole-Gunnar Solskjær and Henning Berg, in Manchester United’s Champions League-winning squad in 1999 seemed, like mermaids, trolls and meadow elves, to belong to ancient, unlikely, Norse mythology.

  Complaints ranged from poor pitches to conservative coaching, youthful indolence and a lack of cash. It seemed easier to wallow in imported televised coverage of Premier League football. In search of greater insight, a more revealing example of potential, I was advised to seek out Frode Samuelsen, who lived across the Karmsundet Strait in the town of Haugesund.

  His son Martin, on loan at Blackburn Rovers having signed a four-year contract with West Ham on his release by Manchester City, had at least helped rescue the national team from irredeemable embarrassment by scoring one of three late goals in that 4–1 win over San Marino. He was attempting to buck the system, with variable results.

  For twelve years, since the age of 7, Martin had progressed along what his father described as an Exposure Ladder. This involved a systemic, individualised approach to skill development, in which he would assimilate video clips of key skills, taken from a clinic by Wiel Coerver, the acclaimed Dutch coach, and stored on his father’s mobile phone.

  Martin practised close control in cage football or on his own in the playground. He learned how best to turn and feint, and dribble the ball using either foot. Once the basics were ingrained, he would increase the pace of his runs, and incorporate different angles. Frode engaged him by devising a scale from one to ten, which ranged in difficulty from basic apprehension of the technique required, to the ability to master it consistently, so it could be employed competitively. A minimum 80 per cent success rate was required for the top mark, which was logged on a spreadsheet.

  The intimacy of contact between father and son can never be recreated in a coaching session overseen by a virtual stranger. The Samuelsens visited leading academies in England and Europe to assess training methods; clubs of the stature of Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United and Real Madrid were beguiled by a boy who had scored 1,500 goals, often playing three years above his age group, between the ages of 7 and 14.

  ‘Every story in youth development is different,’ Frode explained. ‘There is not one solution or formula that solves everything, but key elements have to be in place. We operated on the slogan, “If you want to be extreme you have to go extreme.” The issue is how extreme you can be without being seen as too big a problem for your environment.

  ‘You have to push limits, test rules, and everyone has an opinion about what you are doing. There are social elements to take into account. You need coaches who understand. You meet opponents who feel the pain of being beaten heavily. Parents talk to other parents and they get fed up with coaches concentrating on one player. In a small place like Norway that is a problem.

  ‘Martin has a different mentality from other kids. He is extremely gifted, an outlier in every test of mental capacity they conducted at national level. He was very mature intellectually and confident socially, even at the age of seven. But it is not enough to be positive. At some point you have to make a decision to stick to your character and become the person you want to be, or just accept being like everyone else.

  ‘To stay true to the footballer he has become, Martin presents an intellectual threat to the coach. He operates outside the box, so that he approaches his training differently. His errors must be accepted because he is doing complex things. He is motivated by improvement, is very honest with himself, and has always had a mental picture of how he masters his skills.’

  Scott Anderson, Director of Athletic Training at Stanford University, uses data from military and sporting sources to support his theory that the quality of an athlete’s eye movement determines performance at the highest level. His explanation, contained in the following excerpts from a paper delivered to a Leaders In Sport conference in London, is accessible and plausible:

  ‘The brain operates by planning 2.5 seconds into the future. It is constantly assessing its environment, in anticipation of what is about to happen. This predictive brain function is critical in synchronising incoming information from the outside world with one’s actions. It is required for
simple tasks such as driving a car and riding a bike but also for complex sensorimotor tasks often seen in sport.

  ‘For example, if I throw a ball to you, you don’t see it in real time. Your brain is predicting the speed and trajectory and anticipating the point at which it will arrive, and co-ordinates receiving the ball with the motor system. This sequence is a highly co-ordinated effort that results in a fluid output of cognitive operations, based on the ability to predict.

  ‘This state of orientation is the by-product of the brain operating in the future. People who excel at this are highly co-ordinated, move efficiently, and acquire skill through repetition with ease. Those that are not adept at this exhibit poor co-ordination and are injury prone. The eyes are the most directly accessible motor component of the brain. The brain uses the eyes to orient itself in time and space, and since visual tracking and attention share similar neural networks we can perform assessments on the eyes to determine the quality of brain performance.’

  To put that into context, it is thought the average professional footballer has between five and ten mental images to process in the split second before he receives the ball, and decides what to do with it. The essence of Lionel Messi’s genius is that he is believed to have in excess of 100 options running through his brain in the same timeframe.

  Football is resistant to a frontier mentality, though the ‘brain-centred learning’ advocated by Belgian coach Michel Bruyninckx for more than a decade is chipping away at the rock face of conventional wisdom. His approach, based on the premise the brain is at least 1,000 times faster than any computer, has been recently refined through his work with seventy or so players, aged between 12 and 19.

  Selected from clubs in the top two divisions in Belgium, and based at a secondary school on the outskirts of Brussels, Bruyninckx’s pupils are expected to touch the ball 500,000 times a year, five times more than the boys at Barcelona’s La Masia academy. The programme’s most successful product, at senior level, is Steven Defour, the midfield player who joined Burnley from Anderlecht in the summer of 2016 for a club record fee of £8 million.