Howard’s way: The unsung hero behind football nearly coming home

12 Jul Howard’s way: The unsung hero behind football nearly coming home

So football nearly came home, eh?

Will any credit ever go to one of its chief architects?

With the echo of Baddiel and Skinner’s famous anthem still ringing in the nation’s ears from Euro 96, the man who modernised English football in 1997 charted a course that led to last night’s near miss.

That man with a plan was Howard Wilkinson, a name you’ll barely have seen mentioned, if at all, in recent weeks as just about every pundit and political chancer has tried to muscle in hoping to claim reflected glory that, in truth, truly belongs to the former Leeds United and Sheffield Wednesday manager as much as Gareth Southgate and his team.

Appointed technical director at the FA in 1997, Wilkinson set three main targets, each of which has enabled the England national team become the modern top class group of athletes they truly are with an attitude and appetite for all things good, from the values that make them excel as sportsmen to the taking the knee, not in homage of Karl Marx but for anti-racism, a cause you don’t have to be ‘woke’ to support, just a decent human being.

Wilkinson’s tripartite approach addressed three main issues: the way players are developed, the skills of those coaching them and the facilities on offer for England’s elite players to be coached in.

Firstly, he developed an academy system which, warts ‘n’ all, (and no one has been more critical of its shortcomings than me as the author the award-nominated Every Boy’s Dream – England’s Football Future on the Line), has been a massive improvement from what had gone before, the less wholesome aspects of which were dealt with in the recent Sheldon Report into child sex abuse in football.

Then there was the prickly thorn to grasp about quality coaching – not least the appalling dearth of qualified coaches at all levels of English football. This was a particularly spiky nettle as shrill howls had routinely promoted an unhealthy scepticism of coach education, largely underscored by a dismal logic that saw learning to coach as a weakness rather than a potential strength and any proponent of coaching to be viewed warily as a mere ‘schoolteacher’.

As a result, good ‘ol Blighty lagged decades and often tens of thousands of qualified coaches behind our major European competitors – with a rigid corset cramping any specialist breadth of courses and skills on offer, most notably the total absence of the high watermark pan-continental qualification, the Pro Licence, a pre-requisite to coach in all major leagues around the world.

We lag no more. For the many and varied criticisms of the FA, English football’s governing body now provides a plethora of courses at all levels and a progression path that, in theory at least can take you from coaching the Dog & Duck’s Sunday side to the English national team if you are good enough. Clubs now recognise the relevance of coaching as a requirement or key posts – not least among England’s senior and age representative teams. Southgate and his team included of course.

The third step in Wilkinson’s vision, which he outlined with pride during a fireside chat we had some 20 years ago, was a coaching centre that would become the beating heart of the professional game. A place where England’s national teams could train with the best facilities and under the eye and tutelage of diligent coaches who themselves had been able to learn, develop and exchange best practice far from prying eyes.

St George’s Park opened a decade later in Staffordshire and is now that home, located where it should, in the centre of the country rather than within the M25 to placate Londoners.

Gareth Southgate and his whole team – players and staff – have all grown within the core of this system that if not the envy of the world, is at least as good as any that exists.

It is a professional set up with a dedicated, focused, mindset with preparation consisting of diet, nutrition and sports science, not the supposed ‘bonding’ and escapades of getting mindlessly drunk in the ‘dentist’s chair’ a la England’s build up to Euro 96, wags at war and other sideswiping and snitching from inside the camp that made winning matches a mere incidental aspect of competing in major tournaments.

All this began with seeds. The man who planted them was Howard Wilkinson, England’s unsung hero for whom we should spare a thought as football nearly came home.

Chris Green