Okay, in this the scenario I’m going to paint, Jack Harper is Freddie Kanouté and Ricky Sbragia is the ‘why ain’t he runnin’ around like a headless chicken?’ element of the West Ham or Spurs support between 2000 and 2005.
One of the reasons Sbragia – Scotland’s Under-19 coach – gave for dropping this ‘luxury’ (his word) player – beyond height and physicality – was just that argument. Not enough running.
About seven years ago I was interviewing Kanouté in the puny gym which Sevilla have attached to their training ground. One of the questions I asked him was, broadly: ‘How come you are so much more appreciated, and successful, here in Spain than in the UK?’
Freddie told me: “In the UK there’s still a mentality that you are only doing your best for the team if you are running around constantly. Fans judge your worth on how much you sweat – even if you are running yourself into the ground and not able to capitalize on the best openings when they come your way.
“In the UK a team will be applauded off the pitch if they have lost 3-0 but absolutely run themselves into the ground. In Spain it’s all different in terms of mentality. Most of the fans have a different view – they want quality, they want wins. If you are a creative player and you choose your moments to run, to work, to close someone down, to run into a channel, then you’ll be judged on your intelligence, your efficacy – whether you create a chance, create a goal or score.
“A team in Spain which has won 3-0 but played very little football won’t get a great reception from their fans, and a team which has lost 3-0 but worked its socks off and showed no quality will be panned. But a team which is technically good, which plays intelligently, will win affection and respect. Fans don’t judge you on how much you sweat the jersey, but on the choices you make, the skill you show. It’s another mentality and one that I’ve benefitted from.”
At Sevilla he made more appearances per season than he had at either London club, sometimes significantly more, and scored many more goals, season in, season out.
He won six trophies, but perhaps that’s not what could have been expected at Spurs and West Ham. However, he consistently scored in the big matches – come a final, come a Kanouté goal.
I guess you already see why this week’s nonsense from Sbragia about Harper reminded me of that conversation. Sbragia seems to have the idea that Jack Harper doesn’t run enough, isn’t aggressive enough. He said about Harper: “The last time he was with us, he did okay, but I wanted a little more impact. At Real Madrid he can float all over the place, which he does, but with us, he has to be more disciplined.
“He’s an exceptionally gifted lad, but sometimes we can’t carry him. He can be a luxury sometimes. Unfortunately I don’t get to see him enough.”
It’s beyond parody. According to Sbragia, Harper doesn’t work hard enough. According to me, Sbragia, who is not a full-time coach, doesn’t work anything like hard enough if he’s not flying over to see Harper for Real Madrid Under-19s four or five times per season.
Moreover, Sbragia isn’t paid to be an old-fashioned selector – to pick the team and let the players sort themselves out on the pitch. He’s paid to coach. If he sees things which need upgrading in this player’s armoury then it’s his job to implement those improvements.
If he finds that Madrid have created a Kanouté-type player then it’s the Scotland coach’s job to …. coach him. Ask him to tighten up on tracking. Instruct him when to press in a blue jersey, when not.
My purpose isn’t to be snide about Sbragia. I genuinely think he’s got Worzel Gummage thinking on this issue – head on the wrong way. However, good luck to him. It may be he’s scouted Scotland’s opponents just perfectly and it may be that his team needs a strong dose of height, physicality and stamina to compete with them. But not to the exclusion of quality – a player Sbragia admits is highly gifted.
However, even if Scotland win the mini tournament, Sbragia will remain in the wrong.
ISIS and Putin willing, there’s a future. Time will come when Jack Harper has filled out in the gym, when he’s at his full height – probably about 6ft 1in. When the senior team will need players like him. When that team may possibly even be built around him and other technically able footballers. Like Ryan Gauld, potentially. What were his experiences under Ricky Sbragia?
Will Harper be there for us? Or will he have declared for Spain? Will his international development have been stunted, even a little, by this experience he’s been denied?
We shall see. Meantime I wonder whether we’ve bumped into one of the generic issues which helps explain why, once again, there are no English teams in the elite rounds of European competition for the second year out of three?
In Spain they have a word for one of the attributes that a player like Jack Harper possesses – pausa. It looks like ‘pause’ and for sure it embodies the concept that such footballers can slow things down when there’s a hurly burly and do something of quality.
I asked both Gaizka Mendieta and Albert Ferrer to define it more fully and they explained that this one word includes concepts like doing the right thing more of the time than equivalent players, making difficult situations simple, doing the best thing more often and with fewer complications.
To me the word speaks of the kind of devolved intelligence I always thought UK football began to lack from the middle 1990s – players who demonstrate match interpretation on the pitch, who can judge the flow of a move, of a phase, of a 45-minute section of a game and either react to it or command the reactions of others around them.
I’m not heaping all these qualities on Jack Harper at his age, but I am saying that players like him represent that genre and that we’ve gone from having a plethora of them in the 1960s, 70s and 80s to having fewer and then, suddenly, almost none. Here is one and our country, represented by Ricky Sbragia, doesn’t know what to do with him.
There’s not only a dearth of such footballers in Scotland, but in the English Premier League, too. EPL clubs buy quality, they develop players of huge determination and athleticism, but quite often they are undone in match-management. Chelsea not killing the game when facing PSG’s 10 men, Arsenal committing the cardinal sin of charging forward and gifting Monaco a third goal at the Emirates, Liverpool’s complete inability to control the ball and dull the tidal wave of attacks coming their way when Madrid ripped them apart at Anfield in the Autumn.
Not for nothing did Manuel Pellegrini coruscate his Manchester City players for their first-half display against Barcelona at the Etihad. Not only didn’t they follow his instructions, they looked like rabbits caught in headlights against Barça. It’s not that David Silva, Eden Hazard, Santi Cazorla or Coutinho suddenly become lesser footballers in England – far from it. But the young English footballers around them, who are born into the Premier League, tend not to have the superior touch, technique, vision and pausa which those developed in Spain, Germany, Italy and France have.
Also, no matter how many good players you stock your team with, when the football they are asked to play week in, week out is forgiving, knockabout and fundamentally drawn on height, power, pace, then when that team comes up against an elite side from Spain, France or Germany deficiencies will emerge.
Sbragia, to me, represents a generation – perhaps two or three – of coaches, scouts and managers guilty of bastardising Citius Altius Fortius – higher, faster, stronger.
England’s top clubs play ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’ football – tremendous vaudeville, but no high operatic notes, balletic grace or 7:84 philosophy.
Make a mistake? Gift the ball away? Never mind, the other side’ll gift it back to us in a few seconds anyway. It’s fast, it’s dramatic, it’s full of players who could out-jump a salmon on a pogo stick (work with me here).
Whether Jack Harper is going to become an elite player or not it is, generically, guys like him, often at ages like his who are passed over, told that their limit will be acquiring super-hero status at Darlington or Stockport or Crewe.
I hope, very much, that Sbragia reacts positively to all this. That he sees the error of his thinking, that he engages in learning about Harper and that he engages in coaching him, if that is what is missing between the coach and this Real Madrid prodigy.
I’d like Jack Harper to be emblematic of, rather than solely responsible for, Scottish football’s renaissance. Not emblematic of our dull, retrograde, already discredited thinking over the last couple of decades.
