France’s victory at Wembley on Wednesday night shows England have learnt absolutely nothing from their World Cup humiliation, while back on the home front LFW recalls Ian Holloway’s own great white hopes for the future.
Do you remember the traditional first assignment you were given at school after the summer holidays? If your teachers were as lazy as mine, it will have always been “what did you learn during the summer” and then they would sit and recover from their hangover in the corner while you scribbled things about trips to zoos or, in my case, Bristol Rovers for pre-season friendlies. For Fabio Capello and England, a blank sheet of paper. What did they learn during the summer? Absolutely nothing.
Following our national team’s humiliation in South Africa I wrote a long and impassioned rant (I know, not like me at all) reflecting on everything from the way we introduce our seven-year-olds to football right the way through to the way we select our strikers for the national team. I had a read of it again this morning in the wake of last night’s sound beating by France (don’t be fooled by the narrow scoreline and promising last ten minutes - this was as one sided a 2-1 defeat as there has ever been) and you can do too by clicking here.
Everything I said there continues to apply. Nothing has changed. The short termism that has plagued England for years, sacking managers on a whim and calling up players because they’re flavour of the month with the press only to drop them for the next game, remains. Far from planning ahead for the World Cup in four years time, as I suggested might be a sensible strategy after seeing just how far behind the other nations we really were in the summer, we have a coach in charge who everybody knows will not be here past the Euros. Name me an example of a team, national or club, ever being successful when the manager has set a leaving date. Even Man Utd went off the boil when Ferguson announced his retirement. Is it in Fabio Capello’s interest to build an England team for the future? If you were him would you be putting together a starting eleven of young players, in a settled formation and style of play, and allowing them to grow together even if results are negative in the early stages? No, and why should he? He has one tournament to look forward to in two years and after that I doubt he cares very much. In fact I'm not sure he's really that bothered about even that - he looks like a man who thought England were underachieving because of the manager, and has come to realise it's a poor team made up of players more bothered about club than country.
I have a theory that Capello is a man who would actually quite liked to be sacked, pick up the giant pay off and settle back into a big club role. But even if that’s not the case the short term nature of the decisions he is making is a nightmare for England fans watching on. Why on earth was Kevin Davies called up to the last squad? What purpose did that serve? At 33 years old he’s never going to play in the next championships even if he is good enough, which he’s not. And then he’s dropped altogether, in favour of Andy Carroll, who wasn’t even in the last squad, and probably won’t be in the next one. Neither was Jordan Henderson, but suddenly he’s the one who is in the papers all the time so he’s in, only to probably be dropped when Fat Frank eventually lumbers back onto the scene.
And Jay Bothroyd? I mean do me a favour please, a steady Championship striker in decent form and nothing more. Bothroyd told the press this week that his year with Perugia was the making of him after he’d been ousted from Arsenal and Coventry for being a twat. Nobody picked him up on the fact that his Italian adventure was five years and clubs ago and since then he’s been bumped around the likes of Wolves, Stoke and Blackburn with no real success, and wasn’t even playing well for Cardiff until the start of this season. Will he be in the next squad? I very much doubt it, and nor should he be, so why on earth is he in this one.
The club’s aren’t helping. The hoarding of promising youngsters who need to play first team football and progress continues. Capello selected four Man City players on Wednesday, of which three are currently not in the team. The England Under 21s, playing a totally different system to the senior team which makes no sense at all to me, lost 2-0 in Germany on Tuesday night with just two Premiership regulars in their squad and one of them, Michael Mancienne, plays his football on loan with Wolves while Chelsea shop abroad for another centre half. And, as ever, the raft of withdrawals from international squads and stipulations over how many minutes certain players could play was embarrassing. I’m as guilty of favouring club over country as anybody, but I’ve accepted that while that attitude prevails achievements at international level will be few and far between. Managers criticising the performances of the England team are then withdrawing their players from games with pathetic, minor niggles.
England need a manager for the long term – somebody who is good at getting more out of players than they should really be capable of and be around for the World Cup in four years time so planning can start now for that. That could still be Fabio Capello but there is no point whatsoever in continuing with him if he is indeed intending to leave after the next Euros. Personally I’d have Martin O’Neill but I can’t see it happening. They need to know their best team in the best system. That system could still be 442 although it certainly wouldn’t be my choice, but whatever it is we must decide on it and start working with it now – what exactly did we gain from switching systems every ten minutes last night? What did we learn from that? Put the favoured team together in the favoured system, and replace like with like when players are injured. They need a team of players that will be available for the World Cup in four years time – the point of using people like Jay Bothroyd, Kevin Davies, Frank Lampard, John Terry and others is therefore lost on me I’m afraid.
At the moment we have none of this. We’re just bumbling along from game to game, selecting wildly different squads from one month to the next, calling new players up and casting them aside in the same week, rotating formations repeatedly during games, approaching a World Cup qualifying draw in the summer with a manager who won’t even be the manager then and openly restricting our field of replacements by stating the next boss must be English. We are, if anything, in a worse state now than we were going into the Germany game. The only thing Capello does seem certain about is he doesn’t like Peter Crouch, and the folly of that opinion was gloriously shown up yet again on Wednesday when he scored a fine goal within 50 seconds of coming on as a late substitute.
And the thing that highlights all of these things even more is the latest outclassing came against the French, the only side that had a worse and more farcical World Cup than us. That lot had a universally hated manager consulting astrology over his team selection and a team that wouldn’t even train together six months ago. Now they have a young, talented, forward thinking coach who has overhauled the squad, outed the bad apples, and by God didn’t they look handy on Wednesday.
France have changed and progressed, England remain set up to fail miserably.
The problem with hailing group of players as a ‘golden generation’ is that it rather raises hopes that the team might turn out to be quite decent, which is the misapprehension England fans and the media continue to labour under. I much prefer understating your players’ capabilities to keep the pressure off and allow them to surprise people, as Neil Warnock has spent most of this season so far doing with his QPR team.
But QPR managers haven’t always been so backwards in coming forwards. In 2005 Ian Holloway put together a select group of what he considered to be the club’s best young talent, and infamously said: “if I can’t make a footballer out of one of these I may as well give up.” Our own little ‘jets’ programme was created where these youngsters would receive extra training with Gary Penrice and be fast tracked into the first team.
The problem at QPR then, and now, though is that it’s almost impossible to develop good young players in the system we have. For a start we don’t have an academy, which means that clubs like Tottenham, Chelsea, West Ham and even Palace and Reading will always be ahead of us in attracting young players to play for them simply because they have better facilities and play in a more competitive environment. Our youth sides play on park pitches against Brighton and Barnet while Palace’s take on, and beat, Arsenal and Spurs on purpose built training grounds. There is no reserve league so there’s no semi-competitive adult football to then try our youngsters out on so they are essentially expected to go from these park matches against Aldershot straight into the Championship and inevitably fail.
So whatever happened to our own ‘golden generation’?
Dom Shimmin Perhaps the biggest waste of talent of them all. Shimmin, like two others featured in this column today, was picked up by Rangers after being released by Arsenal’s youth set up. In his case a series of rows with Arsenal coach Liam Brady had seen his time in North London cut short and the early signs for him at QPR were not promising when he arrived late for his first training session. Nevertheless Shimmin seemed to settle down after that and made it into the first team at the start of the 2005/06 season – although 3-0 defeats at Coventry and Northampton in his first two starts weren’t exactly a conspicuous success, especially as one of the Coventry goals came from him striking the ball against his own post by accident. Shimmin’s main problem though was fitness – he had an injury record to rival Matthew Rose and after a loan spell with Bournemouth QPR released him in 2008 and he joined Crawley Town where, again, he spent the majority of his six months there injured. It was only at Scottish First Division side Morton where he played regularly, clocking up nearly 50 appearances in two years, and that earned him a move this summer to pre-season title favourites Dundee.
At the time Shimmin said: “They are the best team in the league. It is the best place for me to develop and reach my potential. The club's ambition matches mine, in the sense that they want to play in the SPL and I want to play in the highest level possible." What he didn’t realise however was that Dundee were on the verge of another one of their financial collapses and he was released from the club six weeks ago when it fell into administration. Shimmin represents one of the biggest wastes of natural talent at QPR in recent years. He was built like a brick out house, possessed superb acceleration across the ground, and seemed to have all the attributes to go a long way in the game. A mixture of attitude and fitness dictated otherwise.
Matthew Hislop The second of the trio of former Gunners youth players, and an all round strange case. Hislop arrived from Arsenal at the same time as Shimmin and made his senior QPR debut away at Leicester in 2005 when the R’s won 2-1 and for 70 minutes he looked really, really impressive. However with 20 minutes to go in that game he fell dramatically to the ground after a routine tackle and as stretched off surrounded by all the paraphernalia that suggested a very bad broken leg or ankle. QPR fans maybe should have smelt a rat when it was confirmed a day later that there was actually nothing wrong with him after all. Hislop was released a year later by John Gregory without ever appearing for the club again.
He then pitched up at local non-league outfit Harrow Borough but went AWOL after just three games. Friend of LFW and Harrow manager Dave Howell said at the time: “Matt had a rough time with injuries and I'm a QPR fan, so I was aware of him as a player. I wanted to help him get his fitness back and put himself in the shop window. He's been involved with some of the goals we've given away and I think that's been frustrating for him. It's a matter of being patient when you're playing below a level you know you should be playing at. I’ve been down this road with other players before. They've seen the shiny side of the coin and, with the pedigree they've got, it's maybe hard to come to terms with this. I've got no problem if he's feeling a bit sick or a wheel's come off his car, but I need players to let me know things like that. If they then make the same mistake again, that's different.” He is now out of the game.
Shabazz Baidoo Oh dear. Shabazz was really well liked by the fans at QPR, basically because he was quick and seemed to have a bit of something about him unlike most of the players coming through our youth team at that time. With Ian Holloway persisting with a front two of Gallen and Santos in the autumn of 2005 - possibly the slowest, most cumbersome and least effective forward line in the history of the club – fans cried out for Baidoo to be given a chance and when he was sent on for a second half run out in a game at Plymouth and immediately scored his first goal for the club it seemed a star was born. QPR, as they tend to do in such situations, immediately gave him a lucrative two year contract that they would later come to regret. It may surprise you to know that Baidoo actually made more than 30 appearances for Rangers, although Holloway (as he was very prone to do with strikers under six feet in height) and then Gregory often used him as a makeshift right winger and it was only Gary Waddock who played him up front. He provided some memorable moments, such as a late equaliser against Leeds at Loftus Road which turned out at the end of the season to be a goal that relegated them and kept us safe, and one in the FA Cup against Luton that was clearly punched in Devon white style. Anybody that does that to Luton Town can’t be all bad.
But things didn’t work out for Baidoo at Loftus Road. He wasn’t quite good enough for the Championship, but seemed to have enough about him to play a division or two lower to a good standard. He was picked up by Dagenham and Redbridge which seemed like a good move but in the meantime he’d decided, as you do, that he wanted to be some sort of bad boy gansta rapper and thus MC Terminator was born. MC Terminator likes to develop his reputation, and ruin his football career, by being arrested in the car park at Dagenham and Redbridge for firearms offences, and appearing on You Tube staggering around the mean streets of Sidcup with a baseball bat rapping about “having a cup of tea.” If you’re in need of a laugh clips are available here and try to remember this is the boy who talked about his mum meeting him off the coach back from that game at Plymouth when interviewed on QPR World.
Baidoo spent time at Gillingham, Lewes and most recently Croydon Athletic with no real success. A waste of talent perhaps and, as I leave you with some of his “freestyle lyrics”, a total waste of flesh and oxygen as well. “In the near future, I’ll turn up outside ya house, run to your mum’s bedroom, I’ll confiscate your mum’s blouse, I’ll run to your bedroom, I’ll tie it round ya neck, drag you off your bed, swing you across the room and break your neck. Everything blesssss and its and its and its TTTTTTTT.” Quite.
Pat Kanyuka Very much like Shimmin in that he seemed to have all the physical attributes and ability to be a very successful footballer, only to suffer badly with injury. The story goes that when QPR used to share their training facilities with Wasps Lawrence Dalaglio et al came across to watch these QPR youngsters playing as part of a behind closed doors match against Spurs after their own session had finished. Rangers, and Kanyuka in particular, were said to be outstanding that day and the rugby boys were impressed.
So far the players in this column all have one thing in common – they were released by John Gregory, but in Kanyuka’s case the no-nonsense manager seemed to actually have a lot of time for him. Indeed he made 12 of his 15 QPR appearances under Gregory’s charge, although often he was forced to play at right back rather than his favoured central role. Kanyuka seemed to be very unlucky with injuries and that proved to be the case again when he moved to Swindon following his release from Rangers post-Briatore takeover. I remember Ben Kosky being particularly critical of the way Kanyuka, who undoubtedly had great promise, was simply cast aside after the money arrived and I too thought he’d prove to be a big hit in the division below with the Robins. But, again, injury robbed him of much first team action and he could only make 23 appearances in 18 months there.
Short spells with Motherwell and Northampton followed before a move to Romanian side Cluj who currently have him out on loan at Unirea Alba Iulia, a lower division Romanian team.
Scott Donnelly If you’re spotting a theme developing here around fitness and attitude, don’t expect that to subside any time soon as we move to look at Scott Donnelly. Another great white hope at Loftus Road, Donnelly was well liked by Gary Waddock who managed him through the youth and reserve sides at Rangers before using him regularly in his first team. Donnelly always curried favour with me by travelling regularly to the away games when he wasn’t playing, which is always a good sign, but during his time at Rangers he developed a rather worrying taste for snooker hall lager and packets of crisps. His weight ballooned to embarrassing levels and he was released by QPR in January 2007. He scored on his debut for Wealdstone Town, but it was a travesty that he ever allowed his talents to be wasted that low down the footballing pyramid and it needed Gary Waddock to get hold of him when he took over at Aldershot to turn him back around again. Newly slimmed off Donnelly scored 14 goals, many of them spectacular, in League Two last season as the Shots made the play offs. Although they were denied in the semi finals by Rotherham Donnelly had done enough to catch the eye of Paulo Sousa, who bought him for Swansea City and then promptly decamped to Leicester without ever getting a chance to use him. That was a shame for Donnelly, who has since made one start and one sub appearance under Brendan Rodgers, and is currently kicking his heals in their reserve team. Still, he’s the only one who has got anywhere close to making something of himself in the game from this little group.
Stefan Bailey Another one well liked by Gary Waddock who has done alright for himself, without ever really fulfilling his potential. When Bailey tackled you, you stayed tackled and although Waddock introduced him to the senior team in the first instance it was John Gregory who got the best out of him. Playing at the heart of the midfield with Jimmy Smith Bailey excelled, picking up man of the match awards in away wins at Luton and Cardiff early in the Gregory era. His next trip to Kenilworth Road wasn’t quite so glorious though, as he was sent off for mistiming one of his lunging tackles and then appeared to headbutt referee Mike Jones on his way off. Release from QPR followed, like Kanyuka, after the takeover was completed and although he failed to impress in the Conference with either Oxford, Grays or Ebbsfleet he is now settling down, and playing England C Internationals, with Telford under the guidance of former R Andy Sinton. As with Donnelly and Kanyuka I feel that Bailey could have been coached into a reasonable Championship player had QPR not been rotating managers wildly at the time.