Foreign accent will take kids back to basics

This was not what the 60 English coaches who assembled at Nottingham Forest's Academy had expected to hear from a man who had helped steer his country to the European Under 21 Championship title last summer.

Remy Reynierse moved outside on to the training pitch and began implementing the blueprint upon which Dutch football is based.

The Forest youngsters took their usual match positions and spent an hour working on flow, creating space, using it.

On the touchline, the likes of Chris Hutchings, Martin Allen, Dario Gradi and Steve Heighway looked on, their minds whirring with wonder at how what they were seeing could be brought into their own coaching.

This cultural exchange is just one of the activities being hosted by the Professional Football Coaches Association as it seeks to bring coaches and new ideas together.

Next May, for example, many of those coaches in attendance will be the ones passing on tips to coaches of amateur teams at the two-day Grass Roots Football Show at Birmingham's NEC.

Reynierse, assistant coach of Holland's Under 21 side, was here not to disprove a myth but to demonstrate a technique of helping academy graduates bridge the gap to the first team — a burning issue in a Barclays Premier League awash with money in which youth is so rarely given its chance.

Reynierse said: 'Most players between 18 and 21 don't get the attention they need. If they don't play in the first team, they train in sessions that are not good for them.

'You have to give them training that is specially for them, training sessions in their normal positions with full resistance from the opposition and with all the choices with which they would normally be faced. Not separate exercises in space and no opponent. That's not football.

'Football is complex. Of course for children of six, it's useful to practise alone and, say, kick a ball against a wall. But even at that age, we play them four against four and we ask them questions, like: "What were you trying to do when you did this? What was your plan? What might be better to do? Think about it yourself."

'You and a ball alone, that's not football. When you see a player keep the ball up for 100 times in a row and being very skilful, that's not football. That's a circus act. Football is about a match. Whoever scores more goals wins.

'Players between 18 and 21 need to improve, improve, improve. They need match sessions at the right time in their development and training impulses each week, each month, each year. You need to improve those players to the point where they can play in the first team and stay there.'

The question, naturally, is whether the Dutch model can be imposed on English youngsters and a set of modern-day values that has become distorted by money and changing social correctness.

Former England centre half Terry Butcher, now manager of Brentford, is doubtful. He said: 'If you tell kids of 19 and 20 to go away and practise nowadays, they'll do it once or twice and then stop and won't do it again because generally kids are lazy. It also comes down to being told when they're younger how good, how brilliant they are. And they believe it.

'I'd like to bring back boot cleaning and stuff like that for young professionals. It gives you a value in your job. If you're going to cheat in your jobs, you'll cheat on the pitch.

'It gives the kids discipline, which is what is missing, particularly in that 16 to 19 age group. They need that discipline. A lot of people say it's not right to have kids on several thousand pounds a week doing stuff like that, but why isn't it right?

'I got slaughtered when I was younger. I signed for Ipswich in the morning as a 17-year-old and at lunchtime the youth team coach told me: "You can't kick a ball, you can't head a ball and you can't pass a ball. I don't know why the manager's signed you." He told me to take a ball outside for 20 minutes each day and practise. That made me fight to prove that I could be a good player.

'Nowadays you can't tell it as it is. There's more diplomacy involved. It's more politically correct. You can't shout at them, you can't do this, you can't do that. It's the eggshell school of coaching. But sometimes they need it.'

Adopting Dutch practice is one thing. Instilling the right attitudes displayed by foreign youngsters is quite another.

Board game: Reynierse (right) with (from left) Chris Hutchings, Martin Allen and Keith Curle Pic: ALAN WALTER

Put the country first and go Dutch

In Holland, youth development is centrally run by the Dutch FA for the common long-term good of the national side. In England, where clubs rule and the national side comes a distant second, academies are run on an every-club-for-itself basis.

Promising teenagers are tapped up, courted and poached. The compensation which the likes of Manchester United and Chelsea have to pay in development costs to a club whose talent they plunder is too often the equivalent of just one week's wages for Rio Ferdinand or John Terry.

Lower division clubs like Gillingham — whose 15-year-old starlet Luke Freeman has drawn rabid interest since making his first-team debut — have to start all over again, while too often the player disappears into the Barclays Premier League giant's reserve side, rarely to be heard of again.

Gillingham's annual budget for its youth policy amounts to £148,000 — many Premiership clubs allocate up to £1million — of which all but £10,000 is a Football League grant. Their youth sides travel to away fixtures in private cars. A team coach would eat up their limited funds.

If there is a silver lining in the imbalance, it is that the Gillingham first team is within reach for their home-grown players — 18-year-old defender Craig Stone is another to have made the transition this season.

The Dutch, by contrast, share players. A talented teenager at Venlo may be shipped to, say, Ajax to develop alongside the best players of his year and then return to Venlo when his apprenticeship is complete.

It works. When England beat Holland to progress to the 2001 European Under 21 Championship finals, the Dutch side contained just three players from the top division. Six years on and there are now 30-40 eligible players in the top division from whom the Holland Under 21 coach can select.

Damningly, there are barely that number of England-qualified players of any age starting each week in the Premier League.