Phil Sharman reflects on the American takeover of Derby County and how promises of world establishment have been cruelly transformed into economic turmoil

It used to be that owning a football club was about prestige. Few of the butchers and haulage contractors who took control of their local team expected to be able to sell at a profit. Today, however, if a club is moved up a level and established there it is possible to sell on at a price which exceeds the original investment. But three years on from their takeover, Derby County fans still cannot see what the American company General Sports and Entertainment (GSE) expects to get out of owning the club.

Read more…

Dong Fangzhuo became an Asian sensation when he joined Manchester United from Chinese side Dalian Shide in 2004. Jonathan Fadugba explores the striker’s drastic decline from Europe’s top stage

Just days after wrestling the title away from defending champions Chelsea, Manchester United travelled to Stamford Bridge for a League fixture on May 9, 2007. All the pre-match talk was of a guard of honour. Would José Mourinho be magnanimous enough in defeat to indulge the newly crowned Champions? He was – but Alex Ferguson sent out a reserve team. What followed was an almost farcical scene as John Terry and co lined up to salute the likes of Chris Eagles, Kieran Richardson and Kieran Lee.

Read more…

Gavin Willacy explores the demise of reserve team football and considers whether there is any hope for future generations

Nicklas Bendtner, Giuseppe Rossi, Michael Chopra, Gabriel Agbonlahor, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Danny Graham, Sylvan Ebanks-Blake and Adam Johnson: not a bad list of attacking talent. Five years ago, all of those were among the top goalscorers in the FA Premier Reserve League. In the Man Utd team that beat Tottenham in the play-off final at Old Trafford in May 2006 were a future World Cup winner (Gerard Piqué), a former European Cup winner (Ole Gunnar Solskjaer), a World Cup goalkeeper (Tim Howard) and a trio of current United stars (Jonny Evans, Darron Gibson and Darren Fletcher). That summer I wrote in WSC 235 about the demise of reserve team football, from being a well-followed event in every club’s week, to an occasional irritant ignored by most. Things have got even worse.

More clubs than ever have pulled out of the three leagues this season. Four Premier League sides – Spurs, Stoke, Fulham and Birmingham – refused to play in the Premier Reserve League (PRL) while 31 of the 72 Football League clubs are nowhere to be seen in the Central League or Football Combination. Instead, there are six Conference clubs making up the numbers. Most clubs give the same reasons for withdrawing: the opposition are full of teenagers, games are played at non-League grounds and the fixtures come at inconvenient times. The first two could be solved by the clubs themselves and the third is invalid. Combination fixtures are postponed and altered at a whim anyway and with just 12 league games each, they should hardly be difficult to fit into a nine-month season.

The opt-outs play “reserve friendlies” instead – mainly Under-20 XIs playing each other on midweek afternoons on training ground pitches, often managed by the youth staff, not first-team coaches. Hardly the experience required to help prepare them for first-team football. One result of the FA’s new Elite Player Performance Plan (see Thanks for nothing, WSC 290) is the end of the PRL and further weakening of the historic Central League and Football Combination, perhaps beyond repair. Instead there is the FA Premier Development League (PDL), a specific programme for the 18-21 age group often overlooked at the smaller, under-staffed clubs.

Generations before mine watched the reserves play at home on Saturday afternoons while the first team were playing away. Until the last decade, reserve football was usually played on midweek evenings at main stadiums with a smattering of first-team players on show to four-figure crowds. Arsenal have retained that to an extent – their PRL games at Underhill are often lively affairs packed with young and vocal fans. But Barnet is deep in Arsenal territory. West Ham play their reserve games at Bishop’s Stortford, an hour’s drive from Upton Park. Nowadays most reserve games are for the obsessive fanatic, the ground-hopper or the shift-worker.

Some clubs still use the stiffs in the traditional sense. Leyton Orient and Gillingham play their home reserve games on their main ground, thus making it less of a humbling comedown for the senior players and giving their emerging youth teamers a taste of a bigger stage. By playing on a midweek afternoon, though, they save the cost of floodlights but guarantee a pitiful attendance.

The FA wants young players to be rehearsing for the professional game by playing weekly matches, preferably in front of partisan crowds. At the moment reserves face dingy dressing rooms, a muddy pitch and a few quips from isolated spectators dotted around a non-League ground. Gareth Southgate said recently that he played 112 reserve games before making his Crystal Palace debut at 21. That grounding toughened him up and Palace waited until he was ready. It would take an unfeasible six to eight seasons to get that experience now. And if he was at Palace they would be friendlies at training grounds, not competitive games at Selhurst Park.

The current average age of players in the PRL is 21, but there will be no age limit to the PDL. Instead it is expected to be manned by Under-21 players with no bar on older professionals making occasional appearances. Just like the current reserve leagues. Rugby league did something very similar a few years ago, replacing its Alliance (open age reserves) competition with an Under-20s Cup. But with each club allowed three overage players, you still get the occasional international veteran sticking out like a sore thumb. Consequently, any talent over the age of 20 that can’t get in the first team is shipped out on long-term loan or released altogether. Football will surely continue down the same route.

From WSC 291 May 2011

Simon Tyers explores the punditry credentials of one of football’s more controversial players, Robbie Savage:

Stating that Robbie Savage is a difficult person to admire is like suggesting Jeremy Kyle could be more equitable. Like Kyle, Savage is the sort of personality who could only have risen to the top of his chosen profession at this specific moment. He’s benefited from the disappearance of the traditional hard man, the short-haired, beefy full-back or defensive midfielder whose raison d’être was to see how many reducers a creative winger could stand, the “that type of player” that no player who lunges in two-footed on an opponent’s shin these days apparently is.

Seen off by clampdowns on reckless tackling, the standard bearer for the player who goes in hard and covers a lot of ground is now a bellicose Scrappy Doo who was once fined for using the referee’s lavatory. Where most retired hatchet-men proudly state their lack of regret for their actions, Savage seems continually flummoxed as to what he’s ever done that people might be expecting him to regret.

Somewhere along the line Savage lost the admiration of fans of the team he played for, which was pretty much all that was keeping him afloat for years. But like most players who seem reasonably approachable and have a certain back-page profile, he was compensated by being invited into the media. Like Stan Collymore before him, Savage proceeded to surprise radio listeners with the breadth of his tactical knowledge and so producers swooped to put him on everything. Like Collymore, the wider exposure has only served to expose his limitations.

In essence, these are threefold. One, he’s still professional footballer Robbie Savage. Two, his natural range is the shrill half-shout. Most importantly, he can’t control his overexuberance when miked up. His comments are usually anodyne but they’ll be delivered as if he’s just been told the oxygen is about to be sucked out of the room. If he can fit a joke in on the end, or just an over the top laugh, he’ll consider it a bonus.

Anyone who saw the ESPN coverage of Man City’s home Europa League game against Dynamo Kiev will be well aware of the deadening touch Savage can bring to any moment. Watching the Premier League’s most singular footballer Mario Balotelli struggle with a training bib, Savage progressed in under a minute from confusion to a lame joke – “I think I’m going to change his name to [expectant pause] Mario Bibotelli!” – which not even Ray Stubbs dignified with a reaction. Having gone for the funny far too early, he progressed quickly to an outraged tone rarely heard outside late night phone-ins on Radio 5 Live. “Is this tonight? Is this now? It’s gotta be a wind-up, this,” he thundered, as if some training ground footage had been accidentally slipped in.

Football Focus, a programme which never met an anodyne footballer it didn’t like, has been using Savage as a reporter for a few months. And so it was that he turned up with pitchside tactical analysis at Everton v Birmingham filmed from an unedifying position adjacent to the cameraman crouching down next to him. This piece was introduced by Dan Walker as “keeping an eye on their tactics – no truck required, though”. It’s always fun to grind Andy Townsend’s reputation back into the dirt at any given opportunity, but the Tactics Truck was a three-minute feature that ran for roughly two months nearly ten years ago. Children the length and breadth of the country must have been seeking explanations from their parents.

Savage then turned up as token Welshman outside the Millennium Stadium ahead of England’s visit, in a production that dealt in national cliches to an extent not seen since the last World Cup game involving an African side – Manic Street Preachers music, helicopter shots of unfurling valleys and a cameo by Miss Wales. Savage was first required to interview Gary Speed, whom he greeted with a Yoda-like fragment of a sentence, “Premier League legend – you are!”, where most people would have used a question.

Afterwards he gave his verdict on Wales’s chances, which was that: “We need the keeper to play like Neville Southall, the defence to play like Kevin Ratcliffe and the strikers to score goals.” Why Ian Rush was overlooked was unclear. No wonder Dan Walker and the pundits had been placed against the backdrop of a local brass band and some chanting children. Clearly someone felt that alternate entertainment might be required.

From WSC 291 May 2011

Arsene Wenger is a man who has always stayed loyal to his purist footballing vision, but is it now time to abandon his principles?

The terms used for the teams at the top of the Premier League have changed during 2010-11; the group once revered as the Big Four are now the more ambivalent “traditional Big Four”. While Liverpool have appeased the masses (and media) by bringing back “King Kenny”, Arsenal have no such party trick available to them.

 The club’s defeats in three Cups between February 27 and March 12 were greeted by a deep despairing groan. After all, apparently Arsenal haven’t won anything recently and, according to David Anderson in the Mirror, “in addition to the flowering of daffodils, another unerring sign of spring is the Gooners’ season disintegrating”. The Sunday Telegraph’s Oliver Brown worried that six years without silverware may be “too much to bear” for Arsenal fans, while in the Observer Paul Hayward described a “merciless vortex” and a “night of a thousand agonies” in Barcelona.

Encouraged by the likes of Emmanuel Petit claiming that Arsenal were “cracking up”, many commentators attempted a deeper interpretation. In the Times, Tom Dart muttered darkly of “long-held weaknesses”, “an underlying psychological block” and that: “If Arsenal did not need a session on the therapist’s couch before, perhaps they do now.” A cognitively minded Duncan Castles backed this up in the Sunday Times: “In times of trouble football teams, like individuals, tend to regress to their fundamentals.”

Affectionate epitaphs were prepared in advance for Arsène Wenger. Mick Dennis of the Daily Express offered a defence: “Wenger’s ‘business model’ is a beacon of hope for a game dominated by dosh. If he fails again, the light will go out. Money will have won.” But most were harsher. The News of the World mocked What’s your excuse this time Arsene? and the Sunday Express wondered whether Arsenal’s manager was now “more manic and barmy than Gallic and charming”, questioning Is le Prof losing le Plot? A prevalent leitmotif of the criticism was reference to Wenger’s new choice of outerwear – a voluminous knee-length puffer jacket. In the People, Dave Kidd asked: “Will the Arsenal board ever seriously question the man in the technical area with the sleeping-bag coat and the increasingly crazed demeanour?”

Indeed, while attention was focused elsewhere, it was quietly announced that the president of the International Fencing Federation, Alisher Usmanov, had increased his Arsenal stake to “over 27 per cent”. The Russian billionaire has previously called for heavy investment in the team and failed with a proposal of a rights issue to raise transfer funds in 2009. If Usmanov continues his gradual share accumulation, Wenger may well be forced to consider his policy of prudence. And further internal uncertainty at the club should worry the manager far more than cod psychology, generalised football “philosophy” or whether his giant padded coat is slightly too big for him.

From WSC 291 May 2011