After the battle of Waterloo in 1815 when the Duke of Wellington’s allied army defeated Napoleon, the Iron Duke uttered the immortal words, “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.”

Fast forward some one hundred and fifty years and another English legend, Sir Bobby Charlton said of England’s 1966 triumph, “The World Cup wasn’t won on the playing fields of England. It was won on the streets.”

This probably says more about the class system than anything else, but at least they got the same result for the country albeit with vastly contrasting tactics.

 

A couple of years ago the Academy Directors of some of the major powers in world football, met to discuss the status of youth football. The main consensus from the clubs was that the game was all the poorer for the decline in street football.  So for all the so called sophistication of the modern game with its high carbohydrate diets, fitness coaches, heart monitors, video lounges, where games and players are dissected, evaluated and re-evaluated, the modern football academy director hankers for the kid on the street with his arse hanging out of his grey flannel shorts kicking a bald tennis ball against a wall with his cheap black pumps for hours a day.

The more affluent a country becomes, the less time kids spend on the street playing football as the alternatives are many. Nowhere has felt the wrath of ‘progress’ more than Scotland. Shipbuilding, mining and the steel industry are ghosts from a bygone age, but nothing compares to the loss to this proud nation of the ‘tanner ball’ players that unearthed the likes of Jimmy (jinky) Johnstone, Jim Baxter, Charlie Cook, Denis Law and Kenny Dalglish.

Every child in Scotland had a ‘tanner ball’ and it would stay with them all day as they dribbled down the road to school, while knocking the small ball against the wall for a return pass and skipping around lamp posts, telegraph poles, dustbins, milk bottles and other obstacles on the way. At school break time it was various games with the ‘wee ball’ in the playground before the dribble home in the afternoon. The smallness of the ball made it very difficult to master, so when the youngsters progressed to a full size ball it was like playing with a giant beach ball and was simple to control.

The land that gave us the White Heather Club then gave us the White Feather Club as thousands of little rubber balls were abandoned, only to be replaced by game consoles. There was enough rubber piled up to please the world population of S&M fetishists for years and England full backs slept easier at night as the periodic humiliation of having ones navy shorts pulled down in front of one hundred thousand plus screaming Scotsman evaporated as the youth of the country took their dreams of beating the ‘auld enemy’ to the cosy surroundings of their bedrooms and Playstations in Leith, Fife and Motherwell.   

The other development that has happened with the demise of street football is that the adults have taken over what was the children’s game. John Allpress is in charge of player development at the FA and he understands what the implications now are for children wanting to play football.

 

It is a fact that 50%+ of players at an academy are born in September through to December and less than 10% are born in May to August. Why is that? They are exactly the same as the other children only they are a bit younger, so why does that discrepancy exist? It is not just the academies; it is all the way through football and grass roots football. The minute adults are involved the bias kicks in. The reason why the bias kicks in is because the adults have a team and they want their team to win so they pick the stronger kids. Your team got beat 4-0 so you are crap, our team won so I feel good and I can go to the tyre factory on a Monday morning and I can say my team wins every week. That is where people get their self-esteem and it is understandable and maybe even human nature but it is only there because people want to win games. When the kids decide, it’s not there and the players that could make it through are among the younger group.”

 

The only adult involvement in street football was when your mum shouted that your tea was ready. You may have been the worst player to ever walk the planet and had the daily humiliation of always been the last to get picked, but at least you were always included and played. If there were six kids you played three a side and if there were forty kids, you played twenty a side.

I recently talked to a coach of an Under 10s team who plays in a friendly league in an affluent town. He had thrashed a team by twenty goals and when I asked him why he didn’t play his weaker players in these types of games. Let your keeper come out of goal and play outfield and change all of your teams positions so that they can take some kind of development out of the game that clearly neither teams benefits from?

He replied that come the end of the season it may be down to goal difference. God save us!

In my day when the children made the decisions, if one team was winning by a large margin in a kick about down the park, we would swap over a couple of players so that it was fairer and more importantly a more enjoyable game.

  

 “The spirit is wrong and it hurts me. I spent my whole career as a manger trying to stop this devaluation of the game. I cared more about the purity and finer values of football than I did about winning for winnings sake – and if that is a sin then I am a sinner. Football should be about taking risks.”