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A commentary on English lower league football quality. where most (over 25 of them) of Jamaica's potential internationals ply thier trade. Interesting......
Fast, strong ... and not actually very good
Don't be fooled by the success of Championship sides in the FA Cup. The nation's second tier represents all that is wrong with English football
Barney Ronay
January 15, 2008 2:18 PM
The Championship: is it really any good? The temptation, of course, is to say yes; and for a number of reasons. For a start there's this year's FA Cup, which has been pretty good to English football's second tier. The third round has already hosted an above average quota of Premier League muggings and capitulations, with the power to add more in this week's replays, starting tonight. To date the Cup has provided the entire Football League with a rather flattering funfair-mirror reflection of itself: of 43 clubs in the hat for the fourth round, 14 are from the Premier League, 14 from the Championship and seven apiece from Leagues One and Two. Suddenly the Championship has begun to look lean and hungry and rather pleased with itself.
Just look at all the people turning out to watch it: crowds at Championship level are unexpectedly buoyant, comparable to the boom period of the mid-1960s. Two years ago English football's second tier even briefly outstripped Serie A to become the fourth best-supported league in Europe, behind the Premier League, Primera Liga and Bundesliga.
The superficial impression is of a vibrant and competitive lower level; even better, one still populated in the main by English players and managers.
Don't be fooled. In truth, the vast majority of teams in the Championship provide us with a working example of pretty much everything that's wrong with the way the game is played in this country. Watch a little Championship football and you realise fairly quickly that the Premier League, with its rag-bag of imported modernisms, is little more than a baroque footballing façade hurriedly Blue Tacked on to the dingy structure beneath. At the lower level the caveman football of pre-modern times - direct, hysterically fast-paced and valuing athleticism and stamina above all else - is still very much at large.
Just look at the kind of players who have tended to prosper there. It took Darius Henderson 25 Premier League games to score his first goal last season. This time around he has 10 already and has been one of the most effective players in the Championship. Stoke's muscular Ricardo Fuller has enjoyed similar success. James Beattie, ineffective at Everton, scored 13 goals in his first 24 games at Sheffield United.
Currently clustered at the top of the Championship are Watford, Stoke and Crystal Palace. All favour a style of play that prizes strength and aerial power above things like - let's see - being able to control the ball and pass it accurately. Watford remain the most extreme example. This is a team that plays as though the recurrent generational humiliations suffered by England sides playing direct football - from the thrashing by Hungary at Wembley in 1953, through the scalpings and black eyes of the Graham Taylor era - had simply never happened.
With his touchline earpiece and team-bonding gimmickry, Aidy Boothroyd has often been described as a moderniser. In fact, the football he preaches is laughably retrograde; and the experience of his Watford team in the Premier League - where they won just five games last season - is salutary. Playing this way will only take Watford so far. At a higher level, where defenders don't make mistakes quite so often under pressure and possession of the ball is rarely returned, your limitations are exposed. In recent times, Bolton survived and ultimately prospered in the Premier League playing football based around delivering quick accurate passes forward from deep positions. But then they also fielded players of the quality of Jay-Jay Okocha, El-Hadj Diouf, Nicolas Anelka, Ivan Campo, Gary Speed and Youri Djorkaeff, who would have looked pretty useful under most systems you could throw at them.
Astonishingly, Boothroyd was even among the names mentioned when there was pressure for Fabio Capello to induct a young English manager into his staff. Can we really not do any better than this? Or are we really still reading from the only script English football has ever produced: a botched instructional manual roughed out around the statistical jottings of Wing-Commander Charles Reep (the godfather of long-ball football and a former Watford employee) in the 1950s and fleshed out by the former FA coaching director Charles Hughes during the 1970s? Following this template, teams in the Championship have chosen to engage in a kind of trial-by-strength for the right to struggle horribly in the Premier League.
There are exceptions, of course, most notably at West Bromwich Albion. Muscled out of the automatic promotion spots last spring, Tony Mowbray's team have toughened up this season but continue to play football based around keeping possession of the ball. Already, they look better prepared than most to survive in the Premier League. Reading have showed the way in this regard: promotion in 2006 followed three seasons of patient, incremental improvement by a team playing the kind of football likely to prosper at the higher level. Although, as ever with any grand plan, it helps if you've got a little money to spend, as Reading and West Brom both do.
Happily, there is a slight sense that this may be a generational thing. In the Championship and leagues below there has been a flowering of younger managers intent on playing a different kind of game: Roberto Martinez's Swansea and Paul Lambert's Wycombe in League Two, for example. Burnley, managed by Owen Coyle, impressed Arsène Wenger in the last round of the Cup, but remain decidedly mid-table. This is often the lot of Championship sides attempting to buck the trend. Trying to pass your way around the second-tier bullies requires a certain standard of player, as well as a degree of courage and patience. It all takes time. And nobody has much of that any more.
There are other incentives towards trying something different. Much is made of the scarcity of younger English players being given opportunities in the Premier League. Championship clubs are in a prime position to take up the slack here. In recent times there has been a slight reversal of the drift away from Premier League clubs recruiting from the lower leagues: Chris Gunter of Spurs, Fulham's Nathan Ashton and Newcastle's Ben Tozer have all made the leap in the last six months. Before them, Gareth Bale and Theo Walcott made a lot of money for Southampton. Developing players is, of course, always a risk for clubs outside the Premier League. But done in the right numbers and with the right level of care young English players could yet prove to be their greatest resource.
There are, of course, plenty of obstacles in the way of the Championship ever becoming an effective nursery of home-grown talent. English football's reluctance to take a punt on players who might not yet have developed the requisite heft and bulk endures - and the Championship is a fearsome arena. For now, at least, it remains a wonderfully well-attended, competitive and occasionally very entertaining league; but one riddled with the kind of bad footballing habits that remain, even now, a distinctly English handicap. So don't be taken in by the odd hiccup among the top tier in the poor old devalued FA Cup, whatever this week's replays might bring. Honourable exceptions aside, the Championship is still a showcase for all the bad old habits of the bad old days.
Fast, strong ... and not actually very good
Don't be fooled by the success of Championship sides in the FA Cup. The nation's second tier represents all that is wrong with English football
Barney Ronay
January 15, 2008 2:18 PM
The Championship: is it really any good? The temptation, of course, is to say yes; and for a number of reasons. For a start there's this year's FA Cup, which has been pretty good to English football's second tier. The third round has already hosted an above average quota of Premier League muggings and capitulations, with the power to add more in this week's replays, starting tonight. To date the Cup has provided the entire Football League with a rather flattering funfair-mirror reflection of itself: of 43 clubs in the hat for the fourth round, 14 are from the Premier League, 14 from the Championship and seven apiece from Leagues One and Two. Suddenly the Championship has begun to look lean and hungry and rather pleased with itself.
Just look at all the people turning out to watch it: crowds at Championship level are unexpectedly buoyant, comparable to the boom period of the mid-1960s. Two years ago English football's second tier even briefly outstripped Serie A to become the fourth best-supported league in Europe, behind the Premier League, Primera Liga and Bundesliga.
The superficial impression is of a vibrant and competitive lower level; even better, one still populated in the main by English players and managers.
Don't be fooled. In truth, the vast majority of teams in the Championship provide us with a working example of pretty much everything that's wrong with the way the game is played in this country. Watch a little Championship football and you realise fairly quickly that the Premier League, with its rag-bag of imported modernisms, is little more than a baroque footballing façade hurriedly Blue Tacked on to the dingy structure beneath. At the lower level the caveman football of pre-modern times - direct, hysterically fast-paced and valuing athleticism and stamina above all else - is still very much at large.
Just look at the kind of players who have tended to prosper there. It took Darius Henderson 25 Premier League games to score his first goal last season. This time around he has 10 already and has been one of the most effective players in the Championship. Stoke's muscular Ricardo Fuller has enjoyed similar success. James Beattie, ineffective at Everton, scored 13 goals in his first 24 games at Sheffield United.
Currently clustered at the top of the Championship are Watford, Stoke and Crystal Palace. All favour a style of play that prizes strength and aerial power above things like - let's see - being able to control the ball and pass it accurately. Watford remain the most extreme example. This is a team that plays as though the recurrent generational humiliations suffered by England sides playing direct football - from the thrashing by Hungary at Wembley in 1953, through the scalpings and black eyes of the Graham Taylor era - had simply never happened.
With his touchline earpiece and team-bonding gimmickry, Aidy Boothroyd has often been described as a moderniser. In fact, the football he preaches is laughably retrograde; and the experience of his Watford team in the Premier League - where they won just five games last season - is salutary. Playing this way will only take Watford so far. At a higher level, where defenders don't make mistakes quite so often under pressure and possession of the ball is rarely returned, your limitations are exposed. In recent times, Bolton survived and ultimately prospered in the Premier League playing football based around delivering quick accurate passes forward from deep positions. But then they also fielded players of the quality of Jay-Jay Okocha, El-Hadj Diouf, Nicolas Anelka, Ivan Campo, Gary Speed and Youri Djorkaeff, who would have looked pretty useful under most systems you could throw at them.
Astonishingly, Boothroyd was even among the names mentioned when there was pressure for Fabio Capello to induct a young English manager into his staff. Can we really not do any better than this? Or are we really still reading from the only script English football has ever produced: a botched instructional manual roughed out around the statistical jottings of Wing-Commander Charles Reep (the godfather of long-ball football and a former Watford employee) in the 1950s and fleshed out by the former FA coaching director Charles Hughes during the 1970s? Following this template, teams in the Championship have chosen to engage in a kind of trial-by-strength for the right to struggle horribly in the Premier League.
There are exceptions, of course, most notably at West Bromwich Albion. Muscled out of the automatic promotion spots last spring, Tony Mowbray's team have toughened up this season but continue to play football based around keeping possession of the ball. Already, they look better prepared than most to survive in the Premier League. Reading have showed the way in this regard: promotion in 2006 followed three seasons of patient, incremental improvement by a team playing the kind of football likely to prosper at the higher level. Although, as ever with any grand plan, it helps if you've got a little money to spend, as Reading and West Brom both do.
Happily, there is a slight sense that this may be a generational thing. In the Championship and leagues below there has been a flowering of younger managers intent on playing a different kind of game: Roberto Martinez's Swansea and Paul Lambert's Wycombe in League Two, for example. Burnley, managed by Owen Coyle, impressed Arsène Wenger in the last round of the Cup, but remain decidedly mid-table. This is often the lot of Championship sides attempting to buck the trend. Trying to pass your way around the second-tier bullies requires a certain standard of player, as well as a degree of courage and patience. It all takes time. And nobody has much of that any more.
There are other incentives towards trying something different. Much is made of the scarcity of younger English players being given opportunities in the Premier League. Championship clubs are in a prime position to take up the slack here. In recent times there has been a slight reversal of the drift away from Premier League clubs recruiting from the lower leagues: Chris Gunter of Spurs, Fulham's Nathan Ashton and Newcastle's Ben Tozer have all made the leap in the last six months. Before them, Gareth Bale and Theo Walcott made a lot of money for Southampton. Developing players is, of course, always a risk for clubs outside the Premier League. But done in the right numbers and with the right level of care young English players could yet prove to be their greatest resource.
There are, of course, plenty of obstacles in the way of the Championship ever becoming an effective nursery of home-grown talent. English football's reluctance to take a punt on players who might not yet have developed the requisite heft and bulk endures - and the Championship is a fearsome arena. For now, at least, it remains a wonderfully well-attended, competitive and occasionally very entertaining league; but one riddled with the kind of bad footballing habits that remain, even now, a distinctly English handicap. So don't be taken in by the odd hiccup among the top tier in the poor old devalued FA Cup, whatever this week's replays might bring. Honourable exceptions aside, the Championship is still a showcase for all the bad old habits of the bad old days.
...as the man said, potential means you haven't done it
!
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