With the continuing restrictions placed upon clubs to limit spending on player recruitment to a percentage of their annual revenue, it seems obvious to me that youth development is becoming increasingly important.
This process can take various forms.
My impression is that with the appointment of Dan Ashworth, Newcastle United started to buy in promising talent from other league clubs much more than we had in the past.
That trend has continued under the tenure of both Paul Mitchell and Ross Wilson and we now have a pool of very promising young players throughout our lower age groups.
The ideal scenario for any club, though, is to mine local riches – to develop “our own”. The emergence of lads such as the Miley brothers is evidence of the club’s own academy developing youngsters from a very early age. Alternatively, they can be fed into the club from other local non-league clubs and youth organisations.
Probably the most renowned of these is Wallsend Boys Club, which enjoys something of a national reputation because of its association with so many players who went on to perform at the highest level. Players like Ray Hankin, Brian Laws, Alan Shearer, Peter Beardsley, Michael Carrick, Steve Bruce and, more recently, Elliot Anderson.
All that is obviously true and grants great kudos to the club but this article was actually inspired by something that has always rankled with me.
When young players appear for league clubs and have been through Wallsend, they are always described as a product of “the excellent/famous Wallsend Boys Club”. That’s irrespective of what that player did before Wallsend featured in their life.
This is nothing against the club. It’s this lazy media approach. Those kids at Wallsend may have been going there for years but they were also going to school and being coached in that system or they may have been recruited from other local youth teams at a much later age. In many cases, parents will have spent uncounted hours kicking about and practicing skills in the back yard and down the park.
Wallsend Boys Club is simply the tip of an enormous north eastern iceberg!
It’s a mild rant, really, but it does annoy me that the schools in particular seem to be totally ignored when a player’s early years are discussed
I have to confess, though, that I have very limited personal knowledge of the club and it’s personnel so I have relied, for this article, on the recollections of a friend who passed through their hands in the early 1980s. His experiences may or may not tally with other kids who have been through the club over many years so I would be interested to read people’s thoughts on that and their personal accounts in the comments section.
I’m going to simply call my friend “B”.
Q. When did you play for Wallsend Boys’ Club?
B. During the early 1980s. Every team at Wallsend had their own coach but Peter Kirkley was regularly present and joined in training sessions. I found him an excellent footballing coach and decent man. I soon began playing out of my skin for the Under 14s, banging them in. The coach of my team was a sound bloke and a pleasure to play under.
Q. Which team(s) did you play for?
B. Initially the Under 14s but the Under 15 side who were captained by future Newcastle star Neil McDonald suffered a blow when their centre forward sustained an injury. Their manager asked if I was prepared to step up and be part of the older set-up because he’d heard some good reports. Most of the Under 15s had been snapped up by League clubs but there were no airs or graces, and Neil McDonald helped me settle in. I stayed in the set-up for the rest of the season.
Q. Did you experience any problems?
The other Under 14 coach took it upon himself to take me away from my Sunday team against the wishes of our manager, as he wanted me to be a part of his squad. I didn’t have a choice in the matter. Alas I didn’t fit in from the start and couldn’t get away with him, I struggled for game time. The scouts who had been keeping tabs and been in touch with me, were often let down when they turned up because I wasn’t starting games.
Q. How would you sum up your time at the Club?
B. I now look back at my time at Wallsend as wasted but that was no fault of Peter Kirkley who I stayed on good terms with.
Q. What would you say the ethos of the club was?
B. Wallsend’s aim was to develop the elite. If you weren’t up to scratch they didn’t want stragglers.
Well, that’s a snapshot. One person’s personal recollections – a random sample of one which probably mirrors thousands of young lads’ experiences across the country. What stands out for me is the importance of the relationship between the player and the coach. How many times have we seen a player flourish when playing for a particular coach and fade into obscurity once they part ways?
If nothing else, I hope this article has afforded some sort of temporary respite from the Bruno Guimaraes articles! I imagine there are many people on The Mag with in-depth knowledge and personal experience of Wallsend Boys’ Club, so I would be genuinely interested to hear your views on it.