No Hunger In Paradise Read online

  ‘Some lads don’t deal with the aggression of being in a man’s world. You’ve just got to brush it off. You’ve got to be at your best every day, regardless. You have to be a twenty-four-hour professional in all aspects. Eat right, train right, recover right, do it all again. That all contributes to a better game-day, and a longer career. You can’t fancy it one week, and not the next.

  ‘There were lots of people better technically than me who didn’t pull through because they didn’t work as hard as me. I’ve always worked hard, always believed you get out what you put into it. I want to develop on and off the pitch, and that means thinking about the external stuff, the media work, as well as the tactical, technical and physical elements.

  ‘It is difficult, when you are coming into an academy at seven or eight. No one knows whether you are ready for such a tough environment. At that age a lot of it has to be around enjoyment. Kids can’t be expected to concentrate on sleep or nutrition or how they live their lives. They are too young. They might end up as a footballer but it is not until they mature that you’ll find out whether they’re committed.

  ‘My family gave me a base, a great platform. The club has an ethos of developing people. It is not only about whether a player can zing a fifty-yard ball on to someone’s chest. It is about the basics, how you conduct yourself. Jason Dodd and Martin Hunter were key people. They taught me it wasn’t nicey-nicey academy football any more. When I got into the first team at sixteen I felt I could deal with it.’

  Hero worship has been distilled; Ward-Prowse’s devotion to David Beckham has evolved from artless boyhood homage, wearing champagne-coloured Adidas Predators or having a spray-on blond Mohawk applied for special youth tournaments, to the sort of professional respect that cultivates deeply ingrained habits.

  Ward-Prowse’s free-kick technique owes much to Beckham, who took three more steps backwards, at the same 45-degree angle, and rolled the ball along the inside of his kicking foot, cutting across it to impart additional spin and dip. Ward-Prowse bends the ball in a similar arc to Beckham, and has learned from practising his windmilling arm action, which relaxes the shoulders and tilts the body back slightly, so the ball is launched more effectively off the ground.

  Such love is not blind; Ward-Prowse reasons that ‘smacking hundreds of balls in training and pulling your groin or hamstring helps no one’, so he rations his meaningful set-piece rehearsal to two twenty-minute sessions a week. He weaves a strategically placed bib into the net as a target, and strikes the ball at different angles, at different sides of the goal. He asks a performance analyst to film him, so he can review the drill when it is complete.

  ‘It is a balance of knowing your body, staying sharp, and staying fresh for games. I’m seeing the ball, making sure the technique is right. It gets harder and harder to ensure the consistency level you need in the Premier League. The standard is frightening, ever-changing. Application is a given. You need pace and physicality, because you come up against guys of six foot six who seem six foot wide.

  ‘You need technical ability and mental strength, because managers are demanding more of you. Every one I’ve had has played the game in a different way. That’s helped me because I know how to play a pressing game, how to play a slightly longer game, how to play through teams. You are always at your max, always learning.’

  His profile means he can no longer get away with the subterfuge he used on the daily train from Portsmouth, where he and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain sensibly hid their Southampton tracksuits. He has a considered approach to the financial rewards available to him, and estimates he speaks to his agent, David Manasseh of the Stellar Group, only ‘five or six times’ a season.

  Like several others in the under-21 group, he was struck by the honesty and realism of a presentation by Southgate that summarised his career on two slides. One charted the highs, fifty-seven full England caps and more than 500 senior appearances. The other outlined the lows, his notorious penalty miss at Euro 96, subsequent death threats and his sacking as Middlesbrough manager.

  Southgate had been encouraged to do so by Lane4, the performance consultancy: ‘In my mind I never won what I wanted to win, so I talked to them about that. I played in big games, but I was pissed off because every time I came with England, the lads from Manchester United and Arsenal were pushing for the title and I wasn’t. So, actually, there’s a lot that I still want to do. I also showed them all the things that went wrong, all the people that had written me off. I was trying to weave in the struggle, because that is what it is going to be like for them.’

  The underlying message, prepare for sunshine and rain, was ideally suited to young players dealing with the uncertainties of emerging from the pupae of modern academies. Revealingly, Ward-Prowse chooses to reinforce the point that management, too, is changing with the game itself:

  ‘Football is different to what it was fifteen years ago. An aggressive tone is normal at half-time when things aren’t going well, but I’ve never seen a manager chucking tea cups around. Managers have their own styles. I don’t think I fully appreciated Mauricio Pochettino, because I was very young, but he was class. Everyone loves him, the way he trains, the love he and his staff show you. It is so satisfying working at that intensity. It brings out the best in you.

  ‘Some may play for the money, but I’ve always believed as long as you concentrate, love the game and work to improve you will get new contracts because the club will want to keep you. Money is an added bonus. It is a crazy journey that you go on, with so many ups and downs, that all you can do is give it your all.’

  In the stack-and-rack culture that permeates the Premier League, even that is not always enough. The most extravagant Las Vegas gambler, mind blown on neon, noise and complimentary cocktails, would hesitate to bet on Chelsea’s academy producing a regular stream of first-team players. By the time that a first-year scholar, Tariq Uwakwe, made his England under-18 debut in Sweden in October 2016, no fewer than forty-five current academy players at Cobham had represented England between under-15 and -21 levels.

  Two of the most prominent are Nathaniel and Trevoh Chalobah. Both have played internationally since the age of 15, and have captained England in their respective age groups. While Trevoh, four years younger, was helping the under-19s qualify for their European Championships in the unlikely setting of Rhyl in November, Nathaniel was on the verge of the most significant breakthrough.

  He has a young thoroughbred’s bearing, a natural air of authority that is emphasised in callow company. He won his ninety-second youth cap when leading the under-21s in France, but only made his competitive debut for Chelsea seven weeks previously, as a late substitute in the League Cup win at Leicester City. Predictably, he found the experience ‘surreal’. He had been introduced to the first-team squad almost six years earlier, as an unused substitute against Newcastle United in the same competition.

  Nathaniel was recruited by Chelsea at the age of 10, three years after the Chalobah family came to the UK from Freetown in Sierra Leone and settled in the south London suburb of Gypsy Hill. He had been taken to a trial game between Fulham and Chelsea by his sister, and his talent was so obvious the Stamford Bridge club made an approach to sign him at half-time.

  The Chalobah children, three boys and two girls, inherited the athletic genes of their father, a former international tennis player. Nathaniel led the way, relishing playground scrimmages with a small ball, and games with his siblings in the garden. He tried sports as diverse as netball and cross-country running, and played cage football instead of taking the usual route to exposure through a grassroots club.

  He admitted to Chelsea’s website that ‘it was all about street cred. Who could do the most skills, nutmegs, that sort of thing. Could you make your opponent look like a fool?’ He was protective of Trevoh and John, his youngest brother, despite being ‘scared every time because the other boys were bigger, stronger and older’.

  He was involuntarily developing the self-reliance that would enable h
im to survive, and intermittently thrive, in isolation. He earned six GCSEs, four at A* level, and was sent out on the first of six loan spells soon after signing a professional contract in January 2012, shortly after his seventeenth birthday.

  Status at Chelsea is recognised by salary, yet there was still widespread astonishment within development circles at his rumoured wage, £36,000 a week. He was, by his own admission, socially gauche, and took time to adjust to life on his own in an apartment block in Watford, where he underlined his promise by playing a pivotal role in Gianfranco Zola’s team, which reached the Championship play-off final.

  He struggled over two subsequent seasons, making little impact at Nottingham Forest, Middlesbrough, Burnley and Reading. Southgate, who had personally recommended Chalobah to Sean Dyche at Burnley, reflected: ‘They were terrible loans. I had a pop at Nat, because he just didn’t get the intensity needed to play, but now the penny has dropped.’

  He managed only seven appearances over the course of a further season in Serie A with Napoli, and had to deal with the death of his beloved mother, yet he returned to Chelsea as a more rounded character; he was fluent in Italian and at ease with himself. A combination of tactical maturity, which he identified as the legacy of exposure to the more cerebral, immersive culture of the Italian game, and political expedience, which encouraged new manager Antonio Conte to satisfy fans’ yearning for homegrown players, offered a long-awaited opportunity.

  Lewis Baker, who scored eye-catching free kicks in those autumn under-21 internationals against Italy and France, was flourishing in exile. He was assertive, expressive, and prolific in his second season on loan to Vitesse Arnhem in the Eredivisie. There was a focus lacking in previous loan spells at Sheffield Wednesday and MK Dons; in essence, he had also grown into himself as a footballer and a young man.

  Southgate admitted: ‘It looked like he was heading down a bad pathway, but he has really impressed me over the past year. It is a combination of things, living in Holland, having to grow up and adapt to a different style of football. He plays every week, scores goals from midfield, and is technically great because he’s genuinely two-footed. It has all come together because he has had to go away and fend for himself.’

  Baker’s discovery was relatively conventional, even if his father Audley’s sporting heritage, as a six-time world powerlifting champion, was atypical. Chelsea beat six other clubs, including Arsenal, Aston Villa and QPR, to sign him as a 9-year-old from Luton Town, who received £8,000 for the year he spent in their Centre of Excellence. All he needed was game time.

  Nathan Redmond, by contrast, had played more than 200 senior matches, for Birmingham City, Norwich City and Southampton, by his twenty-second birthday. He developed his touch and incisive movement in street football but was doubly distinctive, in that all his formative role models, from his mother Michelle to his cousin Sacha and his first coach at a grassroots club, were female.

  His mother’s influence is perhaps best explained by her Twitter biography, which reads: ‘Master of the Redmond household. Mother to Nathan, Niall, Tiah & our angel Tilly in the heavens. Scorpion by birth, sarcastic by nature.’ She juggled three jobs to keep the family together in Sheldon, east Birmingham, and imposed the highest personal standards on her children.

  She refused to allow Nathan to take up a scholarship at Birmingham until he had earned his GCSEs in English, Maths and Science. She was similarly dogmatic in her opposition to her son seizing the chance to sign for Arsenal or Manchester City at the age of 17, because she believed he would be marginally involved at first-team level. Her reward for insisting on a longer-term approach to career advancement was to see him score for Norwich at Wembley in the 2015 Championship play-off, an experience which prompted her to confess, ‘I nearly wet myself.’

  He had been a boisterous youth, who relished pick-up games of basketball, and early indications of a creative mindset were not restricted to his success as a drama student. His solution to every boy’s nightmare, the loss of a front door key when no one would be at home to allow access at the end of the school day, was to make himself a sandwich he didn’t like, and place the key between two slices of bread. His reasoning, that he was less likely to misplace a sandwich box, was the product of conspicuously tangential thinking.

  His mother encouraged a ‘no fear’ mentality, but it takes time for some young players to appreciate the seriousness of the profession. Redmond, at 22, would never dream of giggling on the substitutes’ bench while his team were being relegated, as he did at 17 when Birmingham lost at Tottenham on the last day of the 2010–11 season. He and teammate Jordon Mutch shared a joke before they realised the risk, and lowered their heads to avoid cameramen, seeking stock images of mortification.

  He had been impeccably coached at under-21 level by Richard Beale, who has also been responsible for the emergence of Jack Butland and Demarai Gray, and discovered adversity can be used to advantage. Relegation led to the release of thirteen players, freeing room for him to flourish under new manager Chris Hughton; he made thirty-seven first-team appearances and was named the club’s young player of the year.

  Norwich, progressive and lacking big-city pressure, proved to be an ideal transitional club before an £11 million transfer to Southampton in the summer of 2016. Redmond, named England under-21 Player of the Year, knew he needed independence, though his mother still administered cooking lessons over FaceTime on his smartphone.

  There is a sense of a brotherhood evolving, unseen and under-appreciated, at international level. Redmond, a relative veteran, is so close to Nathaniel Chalobah that his sister Tiah sends the Chelsea midfield player sweets. The England teammates share a slogan: ‘Enjoy the life, enjoy the journey.’ To underline the point, an FA TV clip captured them literally dancing in their seats on the aeroplane taking them to the match in France.

  Southgate had done his job well, on a basic human level. Redmond, too, has a vivid recollection of that presentation: ‘He completely opened up to all of us. It was like: “This is what you’re going to get. I understand where you’re coming from. I’ve been this, I’ve done that.” That was one of the conversations that really got the lads. They felt like they could really open up to him. But he was also saying: “If you’re not ready for this, this is not the life for you.”’

  Football’s popular mythology has the gifted boy retreating to a bedroom that resembles a shrine to his heroes, in order to dream the impossible dream. Passion for the game, a love of its legends, is taken as read. Some, though, cannot claim to be altar-boy perfect in their devotion. Will Hughes, who made his first England under-21 appearance for fifteen months against Italy, following an anterior cruciate ligament injury, has twice flirted with walking away from football.

  From the age of 8 to 14 he was a ‘serious’ tennis player, a sport he believes ‘taught me individual responsibility’. He had entered Nottingham Forest’s academy at 9, but was semi-detached in his commitment, and drifted away after his under-12 season. It was then that his mother took a life-defining initiative. She wrote to more than 100 charities, explaining her status as a single parent, seeking funding for Will’s education.

  He moved to Repton, a public school set in a swathe of rural Derbyshire. He could play football on twelve pristine pitches, and was invited to try out another twenty-five sports. His progress was gauged against such alumni as C. B. Fry, the Corinthian all-rounder, Harold Abrahams, inspiration for Chariots of Fire, and Bunny Austin, the gentlemanly tennis player who preceded Fred Perry. No pressure, kid.

  Hughes played football for the school, a tradition begun in 1893, and turned out for local club Mickleover Jubilee with his friends. He was alienated at 15, when his two favourite coaches at Derby County’s academy left the club, yet when he accepted a scholarship a year later he realised the game provided an outlet for the frantic competitiveness that once led him to throw the Monopoly board across the room when he was in danger of losing.

  Long-term injury tested the moral foundation esta
blished by his mentor Nigel Clough, who advised him ‘not to get sucked into the bubble of football’, and recalibrated his value system. He learned Spanish to broaden his horizons, adding weight to A levels gained in Business Studies and Politics.

  Duncan Watmore, who scored a sublime chipped goal in the defeat in France, is another outlier in England’s under-21 group. Rejected at 12 by Manchester United and rediscovered by Sunderland, playing non-league football for Altrincham at 17, he has a first-class honours degree in economics and business management. Only one other Premier League footballer, former Leeds United and Bradford City defender David Wetherall in 1992, has achieved such academic distinction. ‘A great kid,’ observes Southgate. ‘A coach’s dream.’

  His mother Georgina is a rector, serving three churches in the Tarporley parish in Cheshire. His father Ian, a former managing director of Accenture, held senior civil service positions within Downing Street under three prime ministers, and endured nine months as chief executive of the Football Association before despairing of the chimp’s-tea-party politics that bedevils the domestic game.

  We meet, appropriately enough, in the library at the Academy of Light, where blue plastic scholars’ folders are stacked on rectangular tables. Duncan speaks quickly, at up to 194 words per minute compared to the average of 120, but in a considered, engaged manner that reflects a balanced upbringing.

  ‘You put enough pressure on yourself, so you don’t need your parents adding to that. When we were released by United, in the February, some families stormed out and refused to return but Mum and Dad were adamant that if I was going to leave, I would do it in the right way. I’d enjoyed six years at the club I supported, so the least I could do was stay, train and play for another three months.

  ‘I didn’t necessarily think of myself as the next big thing, but you’ve got to find a new identity as a person, because even though you’re young, everyone has a label. I was known as the “Kid at United”. I was proud of that. It had been all football, football, football, but now I could concentrate on my education, play rugby and cricket, do athletics. It made me a more rounded person.