No Hunger In Paradise Page 22

  ‘I’ve been very lucky. I’ve managed to make it without sacrificing everything. Those years in which I was free, at secondary school really, are the years when you make your best friends, play your sports, go out at the weekend. You can’t do that if you take academy life seriously, which you have to do these days.

  ‘When you get into the first team it is a different culture. People have made their way there in different ways. My route back was a little weird, but everyone is different, in terms of background and personality. It takes a while, but I’ve noticed that as you get older, the regimentation becomes less obvious.’

  He played junior football for Hale Barns, and progressed to Altrincham’s first team, training three nights a week, along the way to securing a place at Manchester University. Alternative education was undertaken at places like Colwyn Bay, where he remembers, fondly, ‘the ultimate scrap’. His pace regularly took him behind the home defence, but he struggled to stay upright on a glutinous surface despite switching from his normal moulded boots to studs. His manager was apoplectic, the opposition vengeful. They won 1–0 but ‘it was basically a fight’.

  Watmore wears a survivor’s smile: ‘You learn a hell of a lot. It’s men’s football. Academy football is kids, there’s no escaping that. By definition you’re going to have to be more physical, smarter in how you play. Another big thing, which maybe gets played down, is the pitches. Academies have the best pitches in the country, and it makes such a difference. You’ve got to learn a completely different game.

  ‘If you can pass the ball and trust your first touch, you play one-touch football. You can’t do that on most of the non-league grounds I played on. You had to be a lot cleverer about how you went about it. When you are on a muddy, overgrown pitch, hearing everything from fans who lose it because they’re angry or a little drunk, you learn different ways of playing.

  ‘It is not necessarily the most fun but though the standard is miles worse than you think you are capable of playing, you pick up so much. At Sunderland a lot of the lads are sent on loan to places like Boston or Gateshead, because you get a false idea of the game by just spending it on the perfect pitches, at the perfect academy, with great coaches. As a player you should definitely take advantage of that, but you need to appreciate the other side of things.’

  Life lessons multiplied at university, initially regarded as a platform for a career in management consultancy. Watmore lived in halls and avoided the traditional Pot Noodle diet by using his football income to buy chicken and salmon, but only knew how to stir-fry. He ‘didn’t realise the taboos’ of the game, so threw himself into the student’s lifestyle before it began to affect his performances.

  The rewards, and the complications, of cutting back were crystallised by his first TV appearance, in an FA Cup replay for Altrincham against Burton Albion. His preparation that day involved lectures in macro-economics and maths statistics, but the adrenaline rush of broader scrutiny and the buzz of a capacity crowd refined his ambition to become a full-time pro.

  Sunderland signed him in May 2014 and he transferred to Newcastle University, where, despite renting a flat close to the business school, he physically attended only 8 per cent of his lectures in the last two years of his degree course. He compensated by accessing online tutorials and studying textbooks during the late afternoon and evenings, and at weekends.

  ‘Everything changed. Football was full-time, six days a week and I’d never done gym sessions before. I didn’t know how to squat, for example, and the rest of the guys were perfect physical specimens who’d had strength-and-conditioning coaches since they were fifteen or sixteen. You get a lot of banter, a nice word for it, but if you’re called a geek, or whatever, it is good-hearted.

  ‘Kevin Ball and Robbie Stockdale, my under-21 head coaches, were fantastic with me throughout my degree because they understood what I was trying to do. Every now and again they’d give me a day off to catch up on my lectures. In general, though, uni never realised how serious football was, and I don’t think football realised how serious the degree was.’

  His bemusement at the stranger’s double-take that signals recognition in city streets is evidence of a more worldly approach to celebrity. He argues that footballers have greater natural intelligence than they are given credit for, since instant decisions, taken under pressure, require a measure of intellectual maturity.

  ‘I’ve picked up so much from senior players. They just know the game. They are so switched on about where to go, how to be, what kind of decision to make. That is such a higher level of thinking than people can fathom. People think it’s just about kicking a football around, but there’s so much intelligence in football that people don’t realise. The word I’d use to describe it is recognition.

  ‘I’m getting better at it, but I’ve got a long way to go. In my position I need to recognise when to dribble, when to take us up the pitch, when to calm us down, keep the ball, when to press off the ball, when to sit in, get our shape, get our breather. I need to recognise the type of players we are playing against; are they quick, are they strong, do you want to put them on one foot or the other? That’s game intelligence. It’s about recognising the situation, the opposition, the circumstance, the way we’re playing, the confidence of the group, the fans, everything.

  ‘The biggest life-changer for me was living on my own, not knowing many people, and having to get my mind into the football and just deal with it. When I was younger I didn’t realise the sacrifice it would take not seeing friends, and acting professionally 24/7. This is not one of those jobs where you can go in and think, I’ll have an off day today, I’ll just chill.

  ‘I’ve learned about the intensity of the group dynamic, how everyone deals with stress, especially being in the relegation zone over the past couple of years. The fans obviously deserve better, and it doesn’t help anyone by responding to pressure by taking it out on one another in the changing room. If you start falling apart as a group you’ll fall apart on the pitch.’

  David Moyes is Watmore’s sixth manager in three years; the battle for individual recognition and the threat of rejection is constant. Careers change in an instant; Watmore heard the anterior cruciate ligaments in his left knee snap in a challenge with Christian Fuchs in the eighty-fifth minute of a 2–1 home win over Leicester City on December 3, 2016.

  The pain was grotesque and immediate. The mentally debilitating process of physical rehabilitation takes the injured player into dark places that Watmore sought, typically, to illuminate by reading motivational literature. In a perverse way, it helps that he has shared the fears of his peers, and felt the mortification of those whose savaged pride prompted them to slip away, without a proper farewell, when the worst news came, and they were rejected.

  ‘I’ve seen many more drop out of the game than stay in, which is pretty scary. The ones who were released here were all quality lads. You see their talent on a daily basis, and you see others with the same talent go on to make it. Small things make the difference: work ethic, luck, opportunity, injury. You need the right time to impress the manager, the right manager for your style of play.

  ‘You’ve got to have faith, but it can be devastating if others don’t have faith in you. It is so cut-throat. Sam Allardyce had faith in me, but I am still learning about the mental side of the game. There are times you need to switch off, because it can consume you. It is so easy to over-think things.

  ‘For most kids, football happens too early. I got the best of both worlds. I got to enjoy my life as a teenager in a stress-free environment. There’s no right or wrong way, but I would advise anyone in an academy to keep the balance of having friends and family outside football. Sometimes you can get carried away about making it as a footballer. You’ve got tunnel vision and suddenly, one day, they don’t want you any more. You will look back, and regret the power of the dream.’

  14

  Ballers

  MILLWALL’S TRAINING GROUND on Calmont Road, in the semi-detached suburban
sprawl of Bromley, is an unprepossessing place. It is warm and welcoming, but short on the sort of creature comforts to which the day’s triallist had become accustomed, as an FA Youth Cup winner and age-group international. He was in the right place, at the right time, with the wrong attitude.

  The pitch furthest from the changing rooms had been nipped by winter. It wasn’t really suited to the bladed, high-socked boots he wore. Yet they were new, worth £280 on the open market outside the sinecure of his kit contract, and looked sharp. They fitted his assessment of his eminence, which blithely ignored the fact his career was in jeopardy.

  His teammates for the day had admired the boots in the changing room, but were dressed for work. The triallist, informed he had no future at his Premier League club, couldn’t get enough purchase on the hard, firm ground and after ten minutes of slipping and sliding, was offered alternative footwear, so that he had a better chance of doing himself justice. His refusal, motivated by a perceived loss of face, sealed his fate.

  ‘Nah, the kid’s not for me,’ said manager Neil Harris, who as a legendary figure at a proud blue-collar club knew the value of a workhorse over a show pony. Millwall have a productive youth system and an outstanding academy manager in Scott Fitzgerald, but there is no time, and even less inclination, to preen in League One. Players with academy pedigree may be permitted the occasional forty-yard diagonal pass, as a genuflection to football’s finer arts, but they are expected to dig in and hit the channel when nothing obvious is on.

  The triallist was quietly replaced at half-time, and at the time of writing, hasn’t found a Football League club. In the emoticon-fuelled fantasy of his Twitter account, he remains a baller, a scion of the Snowflake Generation. Like many of his post-millennial peers his sense of entitlement is matched by his mental fragility and his capacity to take offence.

  Other demographers refer to them as Generation Z, the first technologically driven generation, whose insecurity is masked by their assertiveness on social media. Born either side of the millennium, they are also known as the Founders, the Plurals, or the Homeland Generation. At Tottenham Hotspur they are referred to as the Speedy Boarders, a group which prioritises instant gratification at the expense of such quaint, old-fashioned notions as diligence and merit.

  Football, inevitably, magnifies and distorts such attitudes. Marketing executives confirm boot launches need to be carefully calibrated, because contracted players are hyper-sensitive about being given the latest models as soon as they are available. Woe betide the representative whose baller is beaten in the race to show them off on Snapchat or Instagram.

  Boots are bling, so seductive that even in such a haven of common sense as Tottenham’s academy, the scholars’ lockers are used as display cabinets. Empty boxes are piled high for all to see since they signify the seniority of a player’s boot deal; those players with an annual stash of six or more boot boxes are deemed to be true ballers.

  John McDermott, Tottenham’s Head of Coaching and Player Development, smiles at the pretension, and calls a succession of players from his under-18 squad into a small, sparsely furnished office in the dressing room area to give a human dimension to his philosophy. The boys have an initial adolescent awkwardness in front of me, a stranger, but are impressively earnest.

  Jaden Brown, a defender capped by England at under-16 and -17 levels, bashfully confirms the boot-box culture. Japhet Tanganga, a right-sided central defender who is another international regular, speaks thoughtfully about social distractions and the perils of estate life in his formative neighbourhood, Hackney.

  Jack Roles, whose Lampardesque knack of arriving late in the penalty area from midfield will result in his contributing seventeen goals in twenty-two games before Christmas, explains the relentlessness of agents, seeking his signature. He remains unrepresented since he accepts they will be of little use unless and until he wins his second professional contract; McDermott’s policy, increasingly difficult to sustain in an overheated market, is that first-year pros receive a standard annual wage of £38,000.

  Nigel Gibbs, Tottenham’s principal under-18 coachuntil he joined Swansea City as Paul Clement’s assistant just before Christmas, reflected: ‘John’s moral compass doesn’t move. There are no egos, no agents here. There’s a purity about John in terms of it all being about a player’s development. We don’t buy players in. It doesn’t matter who they are. When they are here there are consequences for their actions.’

  To illustrate the point, McDermott recounted the story of one of his England under-18 internationals, who made the schoolboy error of hiring an acquaintance’s home for a house party. Such extravagant gestures, difficult to reconcile with a scholar’s monthly wage of £380, are quick to reach his ear, since Spurs’ culture at youth level demands grounded, self-contained individuals.

  The reprimand was thoughtful, and effective, since the aspiring pro was ordered to work with the groundsmen at the training ground for a month. It was not intended to belittle and intimidate but to educate; the player learned from the professionalism of the grounds crew, the pride they took in their relatively poorly paid work. It was a reminder of the privileges he had taken for granted.

  McDermott is deeply impressive, impeccably motivated, yet politically vulnerable because of his ill-concealed disdain for the bureaucratic aspects of the Elite Player Performance Plan. Spurs, a club with a creative, cohesive youth strategy that engages Mauricio Pochettino, the first-team manager, were marked down in their annual audit because their academy coaches have the lowest usage of the computerised Performance Management Application. The authorities chose to ignore the inconvenient fact that Tottenham’s first team is studded with players those same coaches have shaped and encouraged.

  As a self-confessed purist, disciplined by his economics degree, McDermott believes English football is suffering from a form of gout, a rich man’s ailment. He is inured to so-called Pedestal Parents, who tend to be over-indulgent and overbearing, second-guessing coaches while disregarding the dangers of being beguiled by the highest bidder for their son’s services.

  This leads to difficulties at international level, where players’ cliques can form on geographic or financial lines. Tottenham’s teenagers, on football’s minimum wage, share a dressing room with teammates who can be earning up to £10,000 a week. McDermott is uneasy with what he calls the ‘bromance’ of selection at younger age groups for England, since experience informs him that the majority of those gilded players will be out of the game by the time they are 22.

  He believes in the veracity of the 800-game rule, which calculates that a senior player’s career will be sectioned into 200 outstanding performances, 400 diligent performances and 200 shockers. His intention, to breed the strength of character to survive setbacks and inconsistency, is inherently complicated by what he describes as ‘Disneyland’ training complexes.

  Young players are examined minutely, from saliva tests to agility exercises, but data-driven certainties do not take into account human nature, or the idiosyncrasies of physical maturation. Harry Kane may be lauded, on T-shirts and in song, by Spurs fans as ‘one of our own’ but as an immature 14-year-old, the youngest in his age group, he was close to being disowned.

  The in-house jokes about his lack of speed, physical definition and agility, which was 30 per cent lower than his peers, have even reached England manager Gareth Southgate, who sees him as central to his plans: ‘Harry?’ he asked with a chuckle. ‘A very stable family background, but loads of loans, and didn’t look a particularly good athlete at a young age, if I’m being extremely kind …’

  McDermott’s creativity and trust in intuition is shared by Pochettino, whose management team reflects the breadth and subtlety of his approach. The Argentine has classic leadership traits: he is warm yet ruthless, emotionally intelligent without compromising his sense of authority. Jesús Pérez, his assistant, is a sports scientist, who coached in Spain and was fitness consultant to the Saudi Arabian national team before joining Pochettin
o at Espanyol and Southampton.

  His analytical approach is balanced by Toni Jiménez, the goalkeeping coach, who won three senior caps and an Olympic gold medal for Spain. He is an extrovert, who employs the rapid, rough-and-ready humour to which footballers traditionally respond. The management group filter and contextualise; they also have an implacable faith in the vivacity of youth.

  McDermott gives two examples of Pochettino’s methodology. The first concerns Nabil Bentaleb, the Algerian defensive midfield player who was playing street football in Birmingham when he joined Tottenham’s academy. The underlying reasons for his season-long loan at Schalke 04, which is expected to end in a £17 million transfer in the summer of 2017, were contained in this apparently throwaway comment by the manager: ‘when your face is not smiling, your feet are not smiling’. The second involves another verbal aside, designed to benefit Shayon Harrison, a left-footed striker who made his competitive first-team debut against Liverpool in the League Cup in October 2016 and spent the second half of the season on loan at Yeovil. Following his involvement in a training session with the senior squad, Pochettino told McDermott that Harrison was ‘lazy’, deliberately loud enough for the player to hear.

  Events unfolded as the manager intended: the player asked McDermott, a more familiar figure, for feedback. He was asked to reflect on Pochettino’s frame of reference; he has worked with Diego Maradona, the embodiment of impulsive genius, and sees, on a daily basis, the dedication that drives Harry Kane to dismiss the doubters. Harrison wasn’t lazy by normal standards, but the observation invited him to examine whether he could give more of himself to his work.