Trevor's review

I would take issue with you claiming our clubs need to get back to developing players...................they all develope players Alan, and if I was able to show you the extent a little club like Barnet are casting their net (monitoring players from as far north of London as Braintree and as far south as Brighton) how all the London clubs are criss crossing one another's territories in the search for talent from boys as young as 7 years old; you would not need convincing that they are not making the effort.

It's the same throughout the country and as you know Torquay United are casting their own net far and wide right down through the South Western Peninsular and even into Northern Ireland and setting up links in Melbourne, Australia. The link with Northern Ireland obviously gave them a head start on the "intelligence" of the potential and availability of Eunane O'Keefe.

I've just spent the whole day today with Anthony who got an opportunity at 24 hours notice to go and "showcase" his ability in front of scouts and recruitment officers of several professional clubs from Premiership down to Conference level as one of an "elite" group of six North London 9 year olds and he has come home tonight with an invitation to join a League 1 club in their pre-season training with a view to us considering an offer for him to enter their Centre of Excellence for next season. This gives me the opportunity to look at them close up, and contemplate the practicality and logistics of him joining a club not quite "on our doorstep". Two others of that little group of six got an offer from the same club too.

Clubs ARE working very hard to expand their youth development utilsing the extra amounts of money they are now receiving (much of it from the proceeds of overseas television rights to Premiership football) but where I would underline a point with which to criticise the biggest clubs is the way they then supplant their Academies with foreign talent amongst the 15 & 16 year old age bracket, causing some very talented players to then drop out to make room for them and the way an ever expanding number of Championship and League 1 clubs are dropping their reserve sides thus denying players who graduate from Scholar to Full Professional the chance to further develope their first strides as fully fledged pro's in an environment just below that of the First Team in which they are expected to emerge.

Add to this the shocking record of a club like Chelsea in bringing through their own home grown talent to First Team level (the last to emerge from their academy and hold down a regular place is John Terry believe it or not) for the very simple reason that they have been buying everything that moves in the world market, and that I feel is the real problem as far as developing players who possess the very real potential to be full international players for England. That is where the impatience is and when you compare the success of countries like Holland and France where their top clubs are in reality little more than development clubs themselves for the cash rich super powers of European football; you can appreciate just why their international teams are so much more technically proficient than England's.

Clubs like Arsenal, Tottenham and Chelsea really need to question themselves and ask whether they are really producing more players for themselves ~ as the West Hams, Aston Villas and Football League clubs are doing ~ or are they in reality producing more players for clubs lower than their own status than they are for their own.

So the conundrum for me as a parent is that should my son get an offer from one of the truly big clubs for him to go into their academy, do I accept that; whilst realising his chances of staying the course and becoming one of their established pro's is very remote. Or do I seek to get him into a Centre of Excellence or Academy lower down the football ladder where his chances will be that much greater? Do I allow him to go in at Under 10 level or do I hold fire and wait for "something bigger" maybe to come along later?

One of Sir Trevor's first assertions from his "Root and Branch" research was the over insistence of Academies in preferring to take on the boys of greater athleticism and power, those born at the start of the school year over those born at the end of it was disadvantaging the younger, slighter and boys of less pace but maybe greater technique and skill on the assumption that they can always teach "athletic specimens" to be footballers but not footballers to be Athletic specimens. This, he asserted; was "dumbing down" the technical level of Academy production to the detriment of the international game as a whole in a way that countries like France and Holland were just not doing.

Looking at the current England World Cup squad, I would say that (a) he was spot on and (b) not a lot of what he has said has been taken seriously enough.