Reply With QuoteIt sticks out a mile that Warnock put the boot in, well that’s my opinion anyway.
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Really interesting interview with Craig Bellamy in the sports section today. Without mentioning Neil Warnock by name, Ballamy speaks of his experience as youth coach at Cardiff. These are a few things he says:
"A lot of people at he club were saying they (the young players) didn't have the quality. But I completely disagreed about that. I said, "I'm telling you now, you've got the players." They had the talent but the discipline was abysmal."
"The under 10s was like a creche, not an academy."
"At the under 18s they were getting battered. They had the ability but they didn't want to run."
"There have been 6 boys from my team (at Anderlecht) making their first-team debut already this season. Not one in 2 years at Cardiff. I tried and tried but I couldn't even get them into first team training."
"Development is something I love. Even as a first-team manager I would want academy players because that should be the heartbeat of every team as well as making it work as a business. I tried to change it at Cardiff because I'm from there. But you can't change above you. Everyone at the club has to believe in it. So it's from one extreme at Cardiff to another here at Anderlecht, where it's all about development."
I recommend reading the whole thing. It's a bit depressing about our current regime bearing in mind our recent performances and what lies in store.
I think Bellamy will be a very good manager one day. I hope he's ours.
It sticks out a mile that Warnock put the boot in, well that’s my opinion anyway.
Well if anything, it backs up the widely held views on this messageboard about our academy, particularly from TOBW.
It seems that on the senior side, our management just won’t trust youth.
It’s beyond frustrating that they are just palmed off to clubs at too low a level to truly help their development. And it’s not like there’s any saleable product at the end of the process.
It’s shambolic and symptomatic of the club needing to come out of the dark ages, but of course Warnock’s made the club better “from top to bottom”...
Managers are under so much pressure to deliver very few have the bravery to promote youth and just focus on today not the future .....
The week before the Swansea game the Swans U18s trained with the first team. One of the team is a Cardiff fan and was getting friendly stick for it. If they can do it why can't we?Originally Posted by billy.ronson
According to TOBW, our U18s play passing, possession based football.
They would probably embarrass our first team.
Even more frustrating as the senior management at our club are useless with big money buys, I’m amazed Tan can’t see this....give Warnock over 3 million and it’s probably a dud, under and he does ok. Bellers, if backed would prob save Tan millions in the long run, I guess he doesn’t care and is happy to blow millions on madine, glatzel, Murphy and Reid etc....
We have struggled with bring youth on for many years, other clubs seem to manage it, why not us
As above. Dinosaurs like Slade and Warnock.
Would appreciate reading the whole article if anyone has a version. Realise The Times asks for subscription so understand if people are reluctant to shareReally interesting interview with Craig Bellamy in the sports section today. Without mentioning Neil Warnock by name, Ballamy speaks of his experience as youth coach at Cardiff. These are a few things he says:
"A lot of people at he club were saying they (the young players) didn't have the quality. But I completely disagreed about that. I said, "I'm telling you now, you've got the players." They had the talent but the discipline was abysmal."
"The under 10s was like a creche, not an academy."
"At the under 18s they were getting battered. They had the ability but they didn't want to run."
"There have been 6 boys from my team (at Anderlecht) making their first-team debut already this season. Not one in 2 years at Cardiff. I tried and tried but I couldn't even get them into first team training."
"Development is something I love. Even as a first-team manager I would want academy players because that should be the heartbeat of every team as well as making it work as a business. I tried to change it at Cardiff because I'm from there. But you can't change above you. Everyone at the club has to believe in it. So it's from one extreme at Cardiff to another here at Anderlecht, where it's all about development."
I recommend reading the whole thing. It's a bit depressing about our current regime bearing in mind our recent performances and what lies in store.
I think Bellamy will be a very good manager one day. I hope he's ours.
Sounds exactly what we need. I might see if I can get a free subscription to read that.
where are Anderlecht in the league? 12th
Where are Cardiff in the (2nd tier) league? 14th.
Here we go full article : .
Craig Bellamy could guess some of the reaction when allegations including bullying in Cardiff City’s youth system, where he was in charge of the under-18s, were first aired at the start of the year.
“I can hear them, ‘Yeah he would do that, he would be like that,’ ” Bellamy, 40, says. He knows the rush to judgment is a legacy of his years as a snarling forward with clubs such as Liverpool and Manchester City, and Wales, and understands it — to an extent.
Bellamy can be tough, uncompromising and, as he sits down to talk at length for the first time since accusations appeared ten months ago, he explains why an apology is necessary for some mistakes, including swearing as a frustrated coach at teenage players.
“Swearing, I apologise for that,” he says. “‘For f***’s sake, close him down.’ That’s inappropriate. Players swearing at each other, I should have stopped it. I thought, ‘18, they can vote, legally do all sorts,’ so it is part of being young men but I accept it’s not right.”
He has wrestled internally with how he handled difficult conversations, mostly around releasing boys from Cardiff’s academy, and whether he was sympathetic enough. “I think that’s one thing that can be thrown at me,” he says. “I found that very difficult to know what to say when they didn’t make it.
“If some thought I was too demanding — and this is where the apology comes in — maybe I didn’t talk as much as I could have done to those I had to leave out or release. I had to release my own son, break it to him that he wasn’t good enough. It’s horrible. Maybe I didn’t show enough empathy.”
But having been forced to stay quiet for so long, he is also keen to provide a fuller picture; to insist that he “deplores bullying” and point out that he faces no action from the game’s authorities after Cardiff’s lengthy investigation.
To point out too that, even with the Cardiff inquiry hanging over him, Vincent Kompany offered him a key job at Anderlecht in charge of the under-21s; evidence, he suggests, that those who have a fixed impression of him might want to reconsider.
“People believe what they want to believe but in football they actually know me,” he says. “Vincent Kompany knows me. To have one of the greatest Premier League players taking you as one of his first appointments into the club he loves, if that doesn’t tell you something then I don’t know what does. I don’t think people think Vincent is a bad judge of character.”
Bellamy is four months into his role in Belgium and with confirmation that the FA will not be taking any action, was happy to sit down in Brussels where he is revelling in his work at a club that takes youth development very seriously.
“There have been six boys from my team here making their first-team debut already this season,” he says. “Not one in two years at Cardiff. I tried and I tried but I couldn’t even get them into first-team training.”
A change of culture has been welcome in many ways, including anonymity. Bellamy has enjoyed blending into Brussels life and, like a true local, even turns up on an electric scooter.
Such a significant move has brought a few reminders of how it was for Bellamy heading to Norwich City from Cardiff when he was a teenager, plunged into a new environment.
“But it was much tougher as a kid,” he says. He suffered from severe homesickness and bullying. The memories are still raw.
“When people say, ‘You can’t do how it was in your day’ I agree,” he says. “I don’t want it like in my time. It was horrible. It was seen as character building but it could be horrendous, mental and physical abuse.
Bellamy said that he wanted to give something back to Cardiff, one of his clubs as a playerBellamy said that he wanted to give something back to Cardiff, one of his clubs as a player
PA
“The good stuff, making friendships, great. But even among the kids, it could be like Lord of the Flies. Stuff with Deep Heat which I can’t really say but it was uncomfortable.”
It left him, he insists, wanting something different for boys he coaches, though they would have to demonstrate the hunger that carried Bellamy from being close to giving up on football to a long, successful career.
A fiercely driven man, he says that the Cardiff accusations have to be put into the context of what he found when, soon after his retirement in 2014, he was asked to help out with the academy.
“I had just retired so I was happy to go in, take one or two sessions. How many ex-players do that for nothing?” he says. “I’m grateful for where I’m from and wanted to give something back.”
It went well enough that Cardiff offered Bellamy the head-of-development role. He very quickly concluded that huge improvements were required, a transformation in attitudes.
“They were thinking of shutting the academy. A lot of clubs were doing that at the time, Brentford, Huddersfield. If you are spending £1.9 million and not getting any players in the first team, what’s the point?” he says.
“A lot of people at the club were also saying they didn’t have the quality. But I completely disagreed about that. I said ‘I’m telling you now, you’ve got the players.’ They had the talent but the discipline was abysmal. I went down to see the under-10s and honestly I left with my head scrambled.
“One player was trying to nutmeg me every ten seconds, another jumping on my back, kids misbehaving. It was like a crèche, not an academy. I spoke to the coaches and said, ‘This isn’t good enough. It’s meant to be a privilege.’
“At the under-18s, they were getting battered. They had ability but they didn’t want to run. They were going out, socialising and putting it all on Instagram. So I said from day one, ‘We have to get stricter, enforce some rules.’
“I told the players, ‘This is going to be tough, intensity has to go up. Some will revel in it and some will want out, it will be too hard for you.’ That’s how it was.
“A few wanted to leave but I can’t tell you the amount of supportive letters I’ve had from parents and players who would love to come out here to Belgium. We won the league for the first time ever and the most professional contracts from one age group.”
So why the need to say sorry, to embark on “self-reflection” and “assess the sensitivities of a new generation of players”?
“I never wanted to get too close to players knowing there would be some hard decisions,” he says. “I still don’t know what to say. Say too much and you feel like you are lying to them. But maybe I didn’t show enough empathy. I’ll apologise for that but I won’t apologise for being demanding.”
He has to accept that he broke certain regulations around youth coaching beyond swearing, albeit insisting that they were not at the serious end.
“There was the time it was raining and I stopped to give one lad a lift,” he says. “I broke a rule. I should have had another adult in the car. I should have let the lad walk in the rain, freezing cold.”
One complaint hard not to smile about is when England were playing Croatia in the World Cup semi-final in 2018.
The squad were on a camp and Bellamy was accused of xenophobia for insisting the volume was turned off on the television for the national anthem.
“What people don’t say is that we had two English coaches and when the anthem comes on, one stands up, hand on chest,” Bellamy says, struggling not to smile. “I turned the volume off so he had to sing it out loud.”
Harmless fun or belittling? “I have to understand that we had a couple of English boys who might not like that,” he says. “But to say I was only playing Welsh players, I have to disagree and the evidence never showed it. I just wanted the best players.
“Every training session was filmed. Was there really anything so bad? I was demanding but I felt I had to prepare them that life isn’t fair. Most of those kids won’t make it and even those that do, how do you prepare a kid for what happened with [Granit] Xhaka, 60,000 of your own fans booing? How mentally does he deal with that? They need to have resilience.
“Maybe these are different times. I watched one team: a player was sent off, the coach goes to speak to him and this lad goes ‘f*** off’. The coach turns to me and says, ‘What can you do?’’ Tell that kid, ‘Who the f*** do you think you are?’ and you’re the one in trouble.
“There are complaints against youth coaches on a weekly basis. Maybe some are justified, some not. Mine took ten months and I was assumed guilty. I felt I had to step down because it wasn’t fair on the players, but who is there to protect coaches because not everyone is guilty?”
That is a question being asked in many sports beyond football. Bellamy pauses. “A lot more was said in the media than ever got presented to me as an allegation,” he says. “The FA are taking no action so . . .”
At the worst of the controversy, he wondered whether to abandon coaching younger players altogether. He had come close to the Wales senior job and had accepted the manager’s post at Oxford United before changing his mind.
Anderlecht was impossible to turn down. “Development is something I love,” he says. “Even as a first-team manager I would want academy players because that should be the heartbeat of every team as well as making it work as a business.
“I tried to change it at Cardiff because I’m from there. But you can’t change above you. Everyone at the club has to believe in it. So it’s from one extreme at Cardiff to another here at Anderlecht where it’s all about development.”
He had always hankered after playing abroad — “my biggest regret is that it never happened” — so experiencing it as a coach is the next best thing, especially at a club renowned for their academy.
Under Jean Kindermans, mastermind of the Purple Talent Programme at Anderlecht, the club produced eight of the 23 Belgium players who reached the World Cup semi-finals last year including Kompany, Romelu Lukaku, Youri Tielemans and Dries Mertens.
“They say ‘In Youth We Trust’,” Bellamy says. “You only have to see the first-team squad, some weeks it has been 11 of 18 from the academy. So for me to get that opportunity here, it was the shortest conversation ever.”
Bellamy’s side have been flying but it has not been easy for Kompany’s first team. A local hero, the defender came back as player-manager but after a very bumpy start, the former Manchester City stalwart stepped down from match-day managerial duties to focus on playing, leaving Simon Davies in charge. Then Davies, a former City coach, stepped back into an assistant’s role a month ago and Franky Vercauteren returned as a senior voice — though Bellamy says “there is only one boss” with a nod to Kompany’s status.
After all this upheaval, Anderlecht sit 12th of 16 teams in the Jupiter League. “Vincent has been very bold in what he’s done,” Bellamy says. “Probably only he could try. It’s a massive reboot.
“Are we going to get results straight away? You can’t have this amount of young players and expect to be challenging. But in my opinion, in one, two years this will be a top club. There are too many good young players not to. If we can keep them, there’s so much quality.
“It’s my job to get them ready for the first team. There have been injuries [including Nacer Chadli, Samir Nasri and Kompany himself] so six boys already made their first-team debut. Two were 18, three were 17, one was 16.
“There’s no point having the best young players in Belgium if we are not playing them. It’s very multicultural, a lot of families with Moroccan heritage, Congolese, Mali, Norwegian, Latvian.
“Lots of different cultures and backgrounds but one thing they share is the work ethic. I came from somewhere trying to instil that in them. Here it feels different.
“Kids at home have to understand that they are competing with these players. They are here for your spots and they are getting exposed to first-team football. We can have a kid who has played more than 100 games at 20. They know they are here to play.”
Bellamy says there are plenty of clubs sniffing around exceptional talent such as Sambi Lokonga, who has been tracked by Barcelona. The opportunity to play is one way they try to keep them. “English lads are seeing that now too. Do you want to go to a Premier League club and join the stockpile or have a pathway, progress, a career?”
From his base in Brussels, Bellamy says that he is revelling in the chance to jump on a train and take in games in Amsterdam and so many nearby cities. His family are back home in Wales but this father of three says he has never been busier.
“I’ve been here four months but it feels like two years with all I’ve taken in,” he says. “Two, three sessions a day coaching or observing.”
He talks of the masterclass he has had from Kompany in the methodology of Pep Guardiola. “Balance is everything,” he says. Bellamy spends five minutes with a paper and pad explaining how City and Liverpool have their own versions of a 2-3-2-3 formation and how it works so effectively not just in possession but pressing.
“I’ve learnt so much,” he says. Like what? “I’ve been critical of Liverpool midfield players not getting enough goals,” he says. “I was wrong, didn’t have a clue. I didn’t understand the role in that system. It’s all about the system, balance, knowing your position.”
It is what he seeks to pass on because finding the talent, he says, is the easy bit. Discipline, too.
“Maybe some people still see me as an angry player,” he says. “They would be surprised by my team talks. These kids just want to learn.
“I love it. Those ten months I really missed the job, hated being away from coaching. I need football in my life.
Very telling interview by Bellamy, we definitely need to change our Academy set up, obviously won’t be changed until Warnock retires!
Does anyone think he maybe selling himself for the role of manager in the future, he must realise NW days are numbered , him and Kompany would be a dream
Youg players these days are way way too sensitive.....You HAVE to accept criticism.....Bellamy has the right ideas..and standards...I would love to see him as next City manager!
What a dinosaur, what's wrong with saying, "Please may I ask you to minimise the space? Thank you very much for your cooperation if you would be kind enough to agree with my request".
I think all of us who have made a point about the way we nurture players can take something from that and believe they were right all along, but it's perhaps not (just) about being sensitive but being spoilt. The lad who got sent off sounds full of himself rather than simply brittle and it's telling that he talks about the different cultures all ready to be diligent when back home that needs to be instilled in players. Maybe the whole club's spoilt - we don't need an academy because we can spend a fortune on players for elsewhere.
interesting interview, he makes the odd apology but explains why he did what her did
from a new coach point of view, as this is a massive no no and biggest rule we were told in the safeguarding section
“There was the time it was raining and I stopped to give one lad a lift,” he says. “I broke a rule. I should have had another adult in the car. I should have let the lad walk in the rain, freezing cold.”
its crazy, as a coach i cannot give a lift ( even with my daughter in the car ) but i can ask other parents to give a lift and watch a 12yr old girl drive off with another parent ? ? ? ?
Swearing is fine, it happens all of the time in a football environment, i suspect it was a bit more than that and Bellamy is only telling the reporter the bits that he feels can be justified to an extent, although none of us will ever know. It's ok to show disappointment, and the odd swear word is ok in moderation, although there's absolutely zero evidence that saying the word 'F uck' ,akes anyone better at anything, could you imagine if it was that simple? Maybe the family of the lads in question should get an interview with a National in order to even things up.
Sadly, it's their to safe guard you as well.
The way I see it, the current crop of academy kids are going to be in for a big shock if they ever make it into the professional ranks. At least Bellamy was trying to prepare them for the reality of having to deal with seasoned professionals, and their win at all costs mentality. Any weak links won't last 5 minutes when the chips are down.
I know a player from the under 18’s who Bellamy highly rated.He told the lads dad that he was banging on Warnock’s door for weeks saying he was ready for first team football but Warnock wasn’t interested,his response was “put him in the 23’s”.Such was his frustration he was actively seeking a loan move,but bad luck with injuries put paid to that.He is now out on loan to a club outside the EFL.
As an aside,the lad said that when Bellamy took a step back after the allegations,the intensity dropped off a mile in training and games.He also said that he had absolutely no issue with Bellamy as a coach.Now I understand if Bellamy was a fan of him,he might not have been treated badly like the others allege,but as always there are two sides to a story.I would have Bellamy as manager in a heartbeat because I believe he would change the club root and branch.
But within the next ten years or so, all pro footballers in this country would've come through an academy, what then, Councilors coming on the pitch just incase one of them is offended? This could be a big problem.
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