By Chris Rivers
It was announced this week that the FA were scrapping Under-8s competitive leagues claiming there is too much emphasis on winning. Having grown up in a time where England hasn’t won anything apart from the Rugby World Cup in 2003 surely they should be keeping this emphasis in an attempt to give people something the English have lacked within sport for years, a killer instinct.
In Australia children are taught that winning is important from a young age in their sporting academies and look how that has worked out. Everything the Aussie’s touch they seem to be successful at. In England though there has always been the idea that it is the taking part which counts rather than the winning. Whilst it is still important to make sure children enjoy playing sports in a competitive match the people involved should be focused on winning. This just might be that I am a competitive person myself but I take a lot more enjoyment out of a sport when I have succeeded in it.
It seems ridiculous that at a time when English football is at a low for producing quality home-grown players that we should take away part of the enjoyment of the sport. I can understand where the FA director of youth football Trevor Brooking is coming from, there is a need for children to develop their skills rather than just smash the ball up field as far as they can. However I thought that was the point of mini-soccer, a scheme introduced a good few years ago where children between the ages of seven and 11 played on a small pitch to allow them to have more touches of the ball and to learn not to just kick a football as hard as they can. This seemed like a fairly good idea to me because the trouble with children’s eleven-a-side games are that, speaking from experience, you don’t get enough touches of the ball when you are younger.
The mini-soccer idea seemed like a good one to me because the competitive element was still there but if that has failed I don’t believe it is the games fault but rather that of the coaches. The other thing England is lacking along with home grown players is a crop of youth coaches to teach young children how to play football properly. Instead a lot of these sides get parents who have grown up with the long ball culture and try to teach that to the kids. It’s a vicious cycle that needs to be broken if we are to see successful English players coming through the youth system yet again. I am a great believer in the idea that if you do it in training then you will do it on the pitch and that if you are taught the right fundamental skills in training you will implement them in a competitive game.
Before we can have a successful England team again we need to bring through a good collection of coaches. I have supported Treavor Brooking with most of his ideas and I am looking forward to seeing the results from the National Football Centres in Burton-on-Trent but scrapping competitive youth football isn’t the right way of changing England’s football fortunes. Instead we should be building more National Football Centres across the country, perhaps making them regional so more children have an opportunity to experience some decent coaching.
Perhaps there is too much emphasis on winning at too younger age and I can see where the Football Association are coming from in saying that parents and coaches push their children to hard. Surely though this just illustrates my point even further that with the right coaches children would have the right mentality. I know it is impossible to control the way parents behave and that has been an on going problem for years but if the FA believe that scrapping competitive football is going to stop parents pushing their children then they are wrong.
Everyone has their own opinion on what needs to be changed in English football, some believe it is the influx of foreign youngsters into the game but I believe that if this country had the right coaches, the right facilities and the right attitude it could be England competing in the Euro 2008 final. Changing the mentality of children is not the way to get there though and it will cost England in years to come when that killer instinct is required and the national football side don’t have it.
