bradley headstone
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Posted: July 23rd 2008
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It’s a funny month, July, and an expensive one. My brand new niece Nancy Kathleen has made it a big three family birthdays in July…fortunately one of them is mine, but you always end up buying yourself the one thing on which you’d been dropping none too subtle hints that were roundly ignored.
For the purposes of this blog we’ll be ignoring the Cricket, the Golf (I wonder, if my brother had fathered a boy would he have gone for Padraig?). For us July is when the football season creaks back into action. Disparate players have sloped back to the clubs they were hoping to leave, managers are finding that the brilliant Zambian they were promised has turned out to be a plumber from Bruges and Frank Lampard is stuck between the rock of his £100,000+ contract at Chelsea and the hard place of his proposed £100,000+ contract at Inter…you gotta feel for those poor boys!
If football clubs were looking to replace their summer wardrobes they’d be delighted by the 50, 60 and 70% sales that have turned our shopping centres into gaudy, poster -festooned centres of desperation. More fly-by-night Firework emporiums than classy clothes outlets. If the credit crunch is hitting football then it’s not obvious.
Season ticket prices have curtailed a few holidays already, personally, having to renew two passports and obtain a third on top has put paid to any thought of either. The transfer market seems remarkably unaffected. Manchester City’s dirty millions were being laid at the toothsome and underachieving Ronaldinho (surely Rob Earnshaw ticked those boxes?). Fulham paid West Ham Six Million for the pleasure of relieving them of two of their wage burdens, Zamora and Pantsil. The former shows that in recruiting a proven Championship goalscorer they, like most of us are convinced that they wont escape this time. I can’t explain Pantsil!
For most football fans, monied or not, July is spent scouring the sports pages, messageboards and rumour mills for any kind of mention of their club. Any spurious link with anybody is devoured hungrily. It’s the worst kind of nutrition mind, empty of any goodness and raising our hopes of satisfaction. We feel full but are lacking energy; it’s the white bread of duck feeding.
I can’t help but think we are looking in the wrong direction. This time last year I was getting excited about the performance of a youngster who had played a couple of first team games the season before and had wowed the crowed in a pre-season friendly. The fact that he soon disappeared without trace and is now playing for a pub team is neither here nor there. Give me one or two decent youngsters coming through over half a dozen million pound imports any day.
I don’t think I’m alone either, would Man United fans be so divorced from the truth of football to be drooling over a Ronaldo or a Tevez if the chance of another Scholes came into view, I don’t think so.
Nowadays it’s the rarity that makes a homegrown player so valuable, it’s been a good five years since I’ve honestly witnessed it and there have been lots of false dawns in-between. But if it happens if you get to see a young player make his debut or perhaps hear whispers of a real prospect in the youth team you get really excited. Even the youngster you poach from even smaller teams can engender this feeling (though not quite the same).
You are aware of the way football works, you know you won’t have him forever. However brief the stay this player will be the first name you look for and you’ll still retain the pride no matter what the colour of his future shirt (I fully accept Everton fans will find it difficult to follow Rooney, but I stand by my feelings here).
For a decent young English player who can survive a middling English league club there is a fairly well trodden path to relative fame and fortune. 90% of them will be bought by Spurs before they are 22, 50% of them will never actually play for Spurs, of the rest 85% will be sold on to Portsmouth. Most will play for England but will be generally considered ‘disappointing’. Paul Robinson will probably end up back at Leeds!
But if one of them happened to play for my club, I’ll be rooting for them all the way.