Huw Jennings Gets Some Clog From Martin Samuel

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MARTIN SAMUEL: Please sir, we keep getting it all wrong! Our schoolchildren should have more time to play sport

By Martin Samuel

Last updated at 4:23 PM on 17th July 2010

Comments (13)

Isn't it strange how some men always have brilliant ideas about how to change football, but not when they have the power to do it?

A guy leaves the Football Association, then wants to tell everybody how the game should be run. When he was there, a stick of gelignite couldn't shift him towards a radical idea.

To this list we can add Huw Jennings, who has come up with plans for an overhaul of the governance of youth football, now he is Fulham's academy director and no longer head of youth development for the Premier League. Thanks, Huw.

Governance is very much the mot du jour in football. The FA, apparently, do not have enough of it since the departure of noted dinner date fantasist Lord Triesman and this is worrying FIFA, who have plenty of it, but nobody with enough wit to stop a stupid ball killing the World Cup.

The Football League think they have it but one look at their rulebook suggests otherwise, whi le what governance the Premier League has is claimed to spend much of its time in moustache-twirling conspiracy against the national game.

What Jennings wants is an independent body (these buzzwords just keep coming) to develop a national strategy (there we go again) geared towards producing young talent. He thinks this should be separate from the FA, Premier League and Football League and cites the fact that France has 14 academies compared to 80 in England, therefore concentrating its talent pool.

This cannot be something that Jennings agitated for so anxiously when he was in power, though, because he presided over a system that insists a club field a team in every age group, meaning there are a lot of supposedly elite youth footballers who are merely making up the numbers to meet regulations, and time spent with the handful that have a genuine chance is diluted. More of this later.

Suppose, however, the problem runs far deeper. Suppose that instead of it being a governance issue, it is a government issue, affecting not just football, but education.

Consider this. In Spain, the secondary school day is over at 2.20pm; in Germany a school day lasts from 8am to 1pm and includes at least alternate Saturdays; in Holland, school hours are flexible, amounting to roughly 30 hours each week, to include a 10-minute break each hour. A child could work two nine-hour days, two six-hour days and have three days off.

Do you see where this is heading? The three European nations involved in the World Cup semi-finals all have school hours that are more conducive to achieving excellence in sport, because greater free time can be given to coaching.

A good swimmer in Britain will rise at roughly the same hour as the milkman to make training before school. As for footballers, school starts before 9am and finishes close to 4pm here, so any specialist coaching can barely be scheduled before 6pm, by which time the child has already done a day's work. (Quite what we are teaching in these schools, considering every German and Dutch player speaks English fluently and some of ours do not, is another matter.)

So we can blather about governance and independent committees, but if the national education system allows a kid in Spain or Germany to be on the training field for two or three hours longer each day, no wonder they are producing better technicians with superior thought processes.
Toughest of jobs: Sir Trevor Brooking
Yet what would happen if, instead of the easy answer to another England disappointment which involves giving Sir Dave Richards a kicking and advocating rules that contradict European Union employment law, we started our overview of England's failure in any number of sports with a look at school hours?
No chance. We play at reform, we tinker with change, we prefer internecine squabbling to action. Jennings's plan for an independent body would never work because the row over its make-up would last 10 years.
By the time it came to pass most of the teenagers it was proposed to help would be living vicariously through their own children on a recreation ground touchline. Jennings did identify one problem, though - even if he did not attack it head-on when he had the chance - which is the complication of the net cast too widely.
This is a clear fault with the academy system because in the five-to-11 age group that obsesses Sir Trevor Brooking, the head of football development at the FA, English footballers are not markedly different to any other. The collapse comes in the teenage years when it would appear elite coaching in rival countries is superior.
Carrying dead wood to make the numbers work is certainly a factor. Say a club have an under 14 squad comprising 16 to 18 players in order to get a team plus substitutes out each week. How many do you think have a serious chance of earning a peg in the first-team dressing room? Maybe four or five, at most seven or eight in a truly exceptional year.
Do those boys get the focused, elite work they require? No, because there is an unwieldy group carrying 10 passengers that must be occupied and therefore instruction is watered down. This is where it goes wrong for young English footballers, who are also denied time by school commitments. Arsenal are among the clubs who advocate pushing year groups together to ensure the best players receive most attention.
I have a friend whose boy is at a leading academy. The club now want him to train on two extra afternoons each week because they need to work on specialist aspects of his game, particularly movement and positioning off the ball, the vision and reading that England's players sorely lacked in South Africa. The school says no, however, because he risks falling behind academically.
Yet, equally, his development as a footballer will grind to a halt without this important next step. So what to do? There is no flexibility in either schedule. The school makes demands because he is a sports scholar; the club make demands because he is an academy scholar. It is too much pressure for a 15-year-old.
And it is not a dilemma that is resolved with further open-ended debate on governance or scattergun attacks on bogeymen in the wake of another defeat by Germany. There is no quick fix because these are issues that cut to the heart not just of sport, but of education in England.

We are falling behind. Look at the product of our schools and our football academies and there is correlation. The dull journey to Bloemfontein begins by bus at 4pm.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1294447/MARTIN-SAMUEL-Please-sir-getting-wrong-Our-schoolchildren-time-play-sport.html#ixzz0txYC7qn5

[ScalleysDad]

Interesting points but the bottom line is that the football brains leave the PL and FA employment bubble as steering groups, working parties and strategic management teams tend to get in the way of actually putting anything out there.
We live on a wet, often cold island where it gets dark circa 4pm for quite a while and the holiday season dictates that most things like facilities are closed over the summer. To try and hook into the Spanish model would be impossible. Change school hours ? Albeit at a lower level west country teams could'nt even get earlier kick off times even though the business and common sense arguments were sound. We now have an Italian head coach and he is introducing more continental influences.,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, alas thats where it will end.