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- Mar 18, 2005
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http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2013/oct/05/english-football-john-beck-fa-coaching
Why the future of English football should not be about John Beck
The FA says it wants to move into a brave new world of progressive thinkers yet it employs a man who will always be synonymous with long-ball football.
At the risk of sounding slightly presumptuous, it is probably fair to say that most people automatically remember the same things when John Beck's name crops up and that there might be a common view if you were to ask what he is up to these days and discover who it is paying his salary.
Mostly, if you are anything like me, it is bemusement and that now familiar sense of wonder about the Football Association's ability to find itself in these positions. There are a lot of ways to describe Beck but the one that stuck during his management days was "Dracula" on the basis so many people thought he was sucking the blood out of football. I doubt if I am alone in thinking the sport had gradually turned its back on him.
Instead it turns out he is on the FA's payroll and entrusted to take the next generation of coaches through their Uefa B-level badges, working out of St George's Park, the place the FA trumpeted as the future of English football. It is a rum old set of events, to say the least, and the relevant people might have to forgive me for wondering what the various players, ex-players and prospective managers enrolling for these courses make of it. At the very best it seems like blurred thinking. At worst it is the kind of decision-making that makes you want to gnaw your own fist. More than anything it is one of those stories you really couldn't make up.
There is certainly a delicious sense of irony bearing in mind the FA's promise to bring English football, kicking and screaming, into the modern era. On the one hand the FA says it wants to move into a brave new world. On the other it employs a man who will always be utterly synonymous with long-ball football. Greg Dyke, the chairman, talks about wanting progressive 21st-century thinkers. What we have, in the nerve centre at Burton, is a man who used to award cash bonuses to whichever player at Cambridge United kicked the ball the farthest.
Everyone in football knows about Beck and the stunts they used to pull at Cambridge but, to recap, we are talking about a club that sometimes made Wimbledon, the original Crazy Gang, look sane. Beck brought in statisticians to lecture his players about how few passes were needed to score. He had the grass grown several inches long in the corners to hold up the ball when his players knocked it over the top. During the week they would rough up the pitch so anybody who tried to play football against them was at a disadvantage. "We just used to boot it upfield, so it didn't really matter to us," Steve Claridge recalls in his autobiography. The ghostwriter, Ian Ridley, was invited into Cambridge's dressing room for one FA Cup tie at Millwall. Beck's team talk is still memorable. "I've been telling everybody you have got lots of arsehole, now go out and prove it." Pep Guardiola he is not.
In the interests of balance it should be pointed out it is more than 20 years now since Cambridge were infamous for their route-one tactics as well as, among other things, giving the opposition heavily soaked balls for their warm-up, banging on their dressing-room walls and turning up the heating so it felt like a sauna.
Beck is fully qualified and there is nothing to say he has to teach the way he used to manage. Which should be a relief to the people who have forked out £900 for his course bearing in mind Beck insisted his players at Cambridge had buckets of cold water chucked over them before every game.
There is also no getting away from the fact his methods were jarringly successful. Cambridge went from 14th in the old Fourth Division to one match away from reaching the top flight and, approaching his 60th birthday, Beck would no doubt argue it is unfair to be stigmatised, especially when he has always maintained that some of the stories were exaggerated anyway. It was not true, he used to say, that he routinely loaded the opposition's teapot with bags of sugar. As for the time he put a poster of Saddam Hussein on the dressing-room wall and told his players to imagine it was the opposition goalkeeper, that was just a bit of fun, apparently.
Each to their own, you might think. René Meulensteen, formerly of Manchester United, has a pretty good reputation throughout the game. He is being tipped to replace Martin Jol if there is a change of manager at Fulham and his absence from Old Trafford has been identified as one of the factors to explain United's erratic start under David Moyes.
Yet Per Nielsen was the captain at Brondby when Meulensteen was manager and tells the story in his autobiography about how the Dutchman used to jump out in front of his players and shout "boo!" to prepare them for the noise of the crowd. Meulensteen changed walls from yellow (Brondby's colours) to green "to give the team hope" and there is another passage that conjures up some delightful memories of Gareth Cheeseman's self-motivational speech, into the bathroom mirror of his Travel Inn, before the Microsell '95 conference.
Meulensteen, according to Nielsen, prepared for a European tie against Frankfurt by standing in front of a whiteboard and asking his players to decide which animal they wanted to be. Nielsen went first, mostly to break the awkward silence, and asked to be a snake. Meulensteen did not like snakes. "Snakes are slow animals, we cannot have snakes in our defence, the Germans will outrun us." So Nielsen suggested a tiger. "That's perfect! Tigers are brave, fast and strong. That is exactly what we need from a captain." By the time he was finished, Meulsensteen had a crocodile, a fox, an elephant, a giraffe and pretty much half of Noah's Ark. "We are smart, fast and clever animals, we cannot lose." Nielsen remembers looking at the board and thinking: "We are sending an entire zoo on the field."
The problem for Beck is that you can try to find the funny side for his story, too, but it is actually tragicomedy. These FA-run courses are hardly ideal as they are. For starters there are just not enough of them when for every 24 successful applicants another 50 or so are turned away.
Maybe I could also direct you to the Professional Footballers' Association website to look at which courses are available. The first Uefa B-level they advertise started in Doncaster on 20 May. There is one in Romford from 7 May, another in Ashton-under-Lyne from the same date and one in Burton, from 3 June. Gordon Taylor gets paid £1.1m a year to be chief executive of this organisation. Yet it cannot even be bothered to update the page that tells its members where to look. Then everyone seems surprised there are 10 times as many Spanish coaches with the Uefa Pro Licence as there are English. Or that it is possible to envisage a day when there are as many English managers in the Premier League (five permanent ones currently) as the number of Michelin stars that have just been awarded to Manchester and Liverpool.
In the case of Beck, good luck to the guy, genuinely, if he is still making a living in the game and has established himself with the organisation whose coaching courses, according to the FA Learning blurb, are to "create a knowledge bank for the whole football family". It is just difficult to be enthused when you remember the Dracula reputation – "the bête noire of the beautiful game", one newspaper called him in the 1990s – or that little nugget from Glenn Hoddle when he called up Dion Dublin, then a Coventry City player, to play for England. Hoddle recalled playing against Dublin for Swindon against Cambridge. "You couldn't tell whether his touch was any good because the ball was always in the air." If nothing else, it is funny to think, all these years later, that Hoddle appears to be unemployable in the FA's eyes while Beck is part of the new era.
Wenger no killjoy over smoking Gunner
Jack Wilshere missed the point when he followed up Arsène Wenger's public criticisms of his smoking by posting an old photograph on Twitter of Zinedine Zidane chugging away on his Gauloises.
For starters it could easily have been construed as a show of defiance towards Wenger even if, more likely, he was simply responding to internet aggressors and trying to shrug it off. His line of defence – if he can do it, why can't we? – is always flawed but, more importantly, football is changing. Mostly it is getting faster and the players who don't stick to the rules tend to get found out in the long run.
Some people still might not understand why the occasional fag matters a great deal but a top footballer should not be among them when Prozone shows that the Premier League is 20% quicker than it was in 2007 and, in Wilshere's case, he has enough problems finishing 90 minutes as it is.
Now, more than ever before, players have to look after themselves impeccably and, if Ryan Giggs can do without butter on his toast because he says it makes him sluggish, Wilshere should be able to refrain from trying to play James Dean before the classic Grange Hill-style response, claiming it was all "a dare".
Wenger is entitled to be irritated, just like Roberto Mancini used to be with Mario Balotelli ("If he were my son, I would give him a kick up the arse") and Sir Alex Ferguson with Wayne Rooney. If you think that makes Arsenal's manager sound like a killjoy, Wilshere is paid handsomely enough to understand what comes with the job.
No butts about it, I like it
On the subject of Zinedine Zidane, that is some statue – 16ft in height – that has just been put up on the Doha Corniche in Qatar in memory of his headbutt on Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final between France and Italy.
Adel Abdessemed's sculpture, the Coup de Tête, was initially unveiled outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris, where Materazzi paid it a cheeky visit and, predictably, most locals hated it.
The Qatar Museums Authority has now bought it and, though it is not to everyone's taste, I have to admit that I quite like it. Whether Qatar, preparing for the 2022 World Cup, has its priorities right is another matter entirely.
The FA says it wants to move into a brave new world of progressive thinkers yet it employs a man who will always be synonymous with long-ball football.
At the risk of sounding slightly presumptuous, it is probably fair to say that most people automatically remember the same things when John Beck's name crops up and that there might be a common view if you were to ask what he is up to these days and discover who it is paying his salary.
Mostly, if you are anything like me, it is bemusement and that now familiar sense of wonder about the Football Association's ability to find itself in these positions. There are a lot of ways to describe Beck but the one that stuck during his management days was "Dracula" on the basis so many people thought he was sucking the blood out of football. I doubt if I am alone in thinking the sport had gradually turned its back on him.
Instead it turns out he is on the FA's payroll and entrusted to take the next generation of coaches through their Uefa B-level badges, working out of St George's Park, the place the FA trumpeted as the future of English football. It is a rum old set of events, to say the least, and the relevant people might have to forgive me for wondering what the various players, ex-players and prospective managers enrolling for these courses make of it. At the very best it seems like blurred thinking. At worst it is the kind of decision-making that makes you want to gnaw your own fist. More than anything it is one of those stories you really couldn't make up.
There is certainly a delicious sense of irony bearing in mind the FA's promise to bring English football, kicking and screaming, into the modern era. On the one hand the FA says it wants to move into a brave new world. On the other it employs a man who will always be utterly synonymous with long-ball football. Greg Dyke, the chairman, talks about wanting progressive 21st-century thinkers. What we have, in the nerve centre at Burton, is a man who used to award cash bonuses to whichever player at Cambridge United kicked the ball the farthest.
Everyone in football knows about Beck and the stunts they used to pull at Cambridge but, to recap, we are talking about a club that sometimes made Wimbledon, the original Crazy Gang, look sane. Beck brought in statisticians to lecture his players about how few passes were needed to score. He had the grass grown several inches long in the corners to hold up the ball when his players knocked it over the top. During the week they would rough up the pitch so anybody who tried to play football against them was at a disadvantage. "We just used to boot it upfield, so it didn't really matter to us," Steve Claridge recalls in his autobiography. The ghostwriter, Ian Ridley, was invited into Cambridge's dressing room for one FA Cup tie at Millwall. Beck's team talk is still memorable. "I've been telling everybody you have got lots of arsehole, now go out and prove it." Pep Guardiola he is not.
In the interests of balance it should be pointed out it is more than 20 years now since Cambridge were infamous for their route-one tactics as well as, among other things, giving the opposition heavily soaked balls for their warm-up, banging on their dressing-room walls and turning up the heating so it felt like a sauna.
Beck is fully qualified and there is nothing to say he has to teach the way he used to manage. Which should be a relief to the people who have forked out £900 for his course bearing in mind Beck insisted his players at Cambridge had buckets of cold water chucked over them before every game.
There is also no getting away from the fact his methods were jarringly successful. Cambridge went from 14th in the old Fourth Division to one match away from reaching the top flight and, approaching his 60th birthday, Beck would no doubt argue it is unfair to be stigmatised, especially when he has always maintained that some of the stories were exaggerated anyway. It was not true, he used to say, that he routinely loaded the opposition's teapot with bags of sugar. As for the time he put a poster of Saddam Hussein on the dressing-room wall and told his players to imagine it was the opposition goalkeeper, that was just a bit of fun, apparently.
Each to their own, you might think. René Meulensteen, formerly of Manchester United, has a pretty good reputation throughout the game. He is being tipped to replace Martin Jol if there is a change of manager at Fulham and his absence from Old Trafford has been identified as one of the factors to explain United's erratic start under David Moyes.
Yet Per Nielsen was the captain at Brondby when Meulensteen was manager and tells the story in his autobiography about how the Dutchman used to jump out in front of his players and shout "boo!" to prepare them for the noise of the crowd. Meulensteen changed walls from yellow (Brondby's colours) to green "to give the team hope" and there is another passage that conjures up some delightful memories of Gareth Cheeseman's self-motivational speech, into the bathroom mirror of his Travel Inn, before the Microsell '95 conference.
Meulensteen, according to Nielsen, prepared for a European tie against Frankfurt by standing in front of a whiteboard and asking his players to decide which animal they wanted to be. Nielsen went first, mostly to break the awkward silence, and asked to be a snake. Meulensteen did not like snakes. "Snakes are slow animals, we cannot have snakes in our defence, the Germans will outrun us." So Nielsen suggested a tiger. "That's perfect! Tigers are brave, fast and strong. That is exactly what we need from a captain." By the time he was finished, Meulsensteen had a crocodile, a fox, an elephant, a giraffe and pretty much half of Noah's Ark. "We are smart, fast and clever animals, we cannot lose." Nielsen remembers looking at the board and thinking: "We are sending an entire zoo on the field."
The problem for Beck is that you can try to find the funny side for his story, too, but it is actually tragicomedy. These FA-run courses are hardly ideal as they are. For starters there are just not enough of them when for every 24 successful applicants another 50 or so are turned away.
Maybe I could also direct you to the Professional Footballers' Association website to look at which courses are available. The first Uefa B-level they advertise started in Doncaster on 20 May. There is one in Romford from 7 May, another in Ashton-under-Lyne from the same date and one in Burton, from 3 June. Gordon Taylor gets paid £1.1m a year to be chief executive of this organisation. Yet it cannot even be bothered to update the page that tells its members where to look. Then everyone seems surprised there are 10 times as many Spanish coaches with the Uefa Pro Licence as there are English. Or that it is possible to envisage a day when there are as many English managers in the Premier League (five permanent ones currently) as the number of Michelin stars that have just been awarded to Manchester and Liverpool.
In the case of Beck, good luck to the guy, genuinely, if he is still making a living in the game and has established himself with the organisation whose coaching courses, according to the FA Learning blurb, are to "create a knowledge bank for the whole football family". It is just difficult to be enthused when you remember the Dracula reputation – "the bête noire of the beautiful game", one newspaper called him in the 1990s – or that little nugget from Glenn Hoddle when he called up Dion Dublin, then a Coventry City player, to play for England. Hoddle recalled playing against Dublin for Swindon against Cambridge. "You couldn't tell whether his touch was any good because the ball was always in the air." If nothing else, it is funny to think, all these years later, that Hoddle appears to be unemployable in the FA's eyes while Beck is part of the new era.
Wenger no killjoy over smoking Gunner
Jack Wilshere missed the point when he followed up Arsène Wenger's public criticisms of his smoking by posting an old photograph on Twitter of Zinedine Zidane chugging away on his Gauloises.
For starters it could easily have been construed as a show of defiance towards Wenger even if, more likely, he was simply responding to internet aggressors and trying to shrug it off. His line of defence – if he can do it, why can't we? – is always flawed but, more importantly, football is changing. Mostly it is getting faster and the players who don't stick to the rules tend to get found out in the long run.
Some people still might not understand why the occasional fag matters a great deal but a top footballer should not be among them when Prozone shows that the Premier League is 20% quicker than it was in 2007 and, in Wilshere's case, he has enough problems finishing 90 minutes as it is.
Now, more than ever before, players have to look after themselves impeccably and, if Ryan Giggs can do without butter on his toast because he says it makes him sluggish, Wilshere should be able to refrain from trying to play James Dean before the classic Grange Hill-style response, claiming it was all "a dare".
Wenger is entitled to be irritated, just like Roberto Mancini used to be with Mario Balotelli ("If he were my son, I would give him a kick up the arse") and Sir Alex Ferguson with Wayne Rooney. If you think that makes Arsenal's manager sound like a killjoy, Wilshere is paid handsomely enough to understand what comes with the job.
No butts about it, I like it
On the subject of Zinedine Zidane, that is some statue – 16ft in height – that has just been put up on the Doha Corniche in Qatar in memory of his headbutt on Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final between France and Italy.
Adel Abdessemed's sculpture, the Coup de Tête, was initially unveiled outside the Pompidou Centre in Paris, where Materazzi paid it a cheeky visit and, predictably, most locals hated it.
The Qatar Museums Authority has now bought it and, though it is not to everyone's taste, I have to admit that I quite like it. Whether Qatar, preparing for the 2022 World Cup, has its priorities right is another matter entirely.
