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We don't need no education
11/23/06 |
| So
it appears that the National Football Centre has pretty much bitten
the dust. The flagship centre for the development of the game at Rangemoor,
near Burton on Trent, looks set to be mothballed. Given that it includes
enough land for eight football pitches, that might just be the biggest
mothball in the history of the world. As it stands, the £80million project that was going to revolutionise the development of young footballers in this country is now little more than extremely well manicured grazing land. And the only way that it's ever going to be used for its original purpose seems to be if David Beckham decides to set up an academy of his own to educate the kids. That's not going to come cheap and since the Lady Victoria has presumably earmarked most of David's post-retirement funds for crucial items such as hair extensions, collagen and open ended accounts at Prada - as opposed to Pravda, where the clothes aren't so impressive, but they are much cheaper comrade. Which suggests that, in the end, the NFC might become a KFC instead. When it was first proposed, back in the mists of time, Howard Wilkinson was the FA's technical director, a post he's long since vacated, so the news isn't all bad. But even so, the failure to complete the scheme underlines the complete absence of strategic thinking at the very top of the Football Association over the course of the last decade. The big problem is, of course, Wembley Stadium. The complete shambles that the rebuilding of the stadium complex has become is not simply an embarrassment. It's a disaster that has threatened to bankrupt the FA, that has left the top of the game in turmoil and that has destroyed the original idea of a National Football Centre where the brightest young English talent could be schooled to a level where finally, in a decade or more, they might provide the foundation of an England side with enough technical ability and tactical nous to turn up at a major footballing talent and not turn in another humiliating failure. The FA's determination to build a new national stadium doesn't even make that much sense, certainly not at the cost. The experiment of taking the England team around the country has been hugely successful, giving people all over the country the chance to see their team. And it is their team, not London's team, incidentally. With Newcastle being able to cram 50,000 people in, Old Trafford big enough to house 70,000 plus, Liverpool having a new stadium soon and the Emirates now on stream, there are more than enough grounds all over England capable of hosting an international, the same policy that most continental countries use. And with the Millennium doing a great job of hosting cup finals of various kinds, there's no need to find a venue for those either. So what was the point? The spiraling cost of Wembley makes little or no sense to most of us, especially when Arsenal managed to build their stadium inside a tiny little piece of north London, on time and on budget. Of course building projects are tricky things to cost, but the scale of the accounting cock up on Wembley beggars belief and its implications are catastrophic, setting back youth football by years. More important, it underlines just what we think of youth football in England, that it's just a little add on. It'd be nice if we could spend a few bob on it, but it doesn't really matter. That's the shortsighted approach that we've lived with for years. It's no coincidence that for 40 years, England haven't won anything, nor looked like winning anything. And the prospects for changing that look a little worse with the demise of the National Football Centre. |
FirstTouch is published weekly by David Witchard
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