The Nowhere Men: The Unknown Story of Football's True Talent Spotters
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Mel, my mentor, was pursuing a pet project, Jack Butland. The teenaged goalkeeper had been sent out on loan to Cheltenham by Birmingham City, who cherished him as an indigent would treasure a winning lottery ticket. The received wisdom, that Butland was destined to emerge as the most viable competitor to Joe Hart at international level, needed the reality check of constant assessment. Southend was an entirely different environment from Switzerland and Colombia, where Johnson’s interest in the goalkeeper had been piqued. This would be the ninth time he had personally monitored his progress.
‘I first saw him play in Nyon, with the England under nineteens, against Switzerland. When I got back I called Chris Hughton at Birmingham, who I know well. “You’ve got a goalkeeper on your hands,” I told him. “His shirt is out, his socks are down. He doesn’t look the part, but he’s got it allright.” He must have had a word because the next time I saw Jack, at the world under twenties in Colombia, I was really impressed by how he’d changed. He’d got taller. He held himself better. The shirt was in and the socks were up. He looked professional, an England player. I watched him four times out there, and he was outstanding.
‘That was a good side. I got excited, put a report in the system straight away and got a message to Damien. I did some groundwork, and arranged to meet Jack’s agent. We had a coffee before one of the Cheltenham games, and I got to know his deal. John Achterberg, our goalkeeping coach, and Alan Harper went to watch him. There are lots of rumours going around. Chelsea are interested, Man City, Arsenal, the usual suspects. Everybody’s been to watch him. I don’t know about other clubs, but we’re still on the fence. To us, he doesn’t come and catch the ball with conviction. He doesn’t come off his line and smash it away. He doesn’t come between the bodies and claim it. At the moment he looks hesitant. The one thing we hope is that this is a passing phase. The worry is that it is a real problem.
‘It is so difficult with young players. I was with Stuart Pearce at Wycombe the other night. Stuart told me he loved Jack to bits. That’s reassuring because of the respect I have for him. I had a great conversation with him about the development of the young ones. I threw names at him. I asked what he thought of Lewis Dunk at Brighton, the centre back who is interesting quite a few. Stuart’s had him in his under twenty-one squad but I don’t fancy him at all. I will still keep watching him, just because he’s young and a left-sided centre half, but he only ever kicks with his right foot. He’s not for me, but it was interesting to gauge Stuart’s reaction. In England, for Liverpool at the moment, it’s all about the recruitment of young players.’
Excellence in scouting, as in any other profession, involves the accumulation and application of knowledge. Johnson had acquired experience, over three decades, at clubs as diverse as Cambridge United, Crystal Palace, Fulham, Tottenham, Huddersfield and Newcastle. He was not a goalkeeping specialist, but had a rare insight into the complexities of the trade. He almost earned himself a niche, as the man who discovered Joe Hart:
‘You see a Gareth Bale and things work out well. There are other boys you don’t sign, like Joe Hart. Kenny Jackett was managing Swansea in League Two when I went to Tottenham; Frank Arnesen took me there in February 2005 from QPR, where I was chief scout. One day Ken called me and said, “Mel, there’s a boy at Shrewsbury in goal called Hart. You’ve got to go and see him, he’s fantastic.” So I went and really liked him. Frank had brought me in to get the best young players to Spurs and I told him Joe was one worth having. He liked the idea. Hans Sagers, Tottenham’s first team goalkeeping coach, went to watch him play at Barnet. He liked him, too, and we decided to go for it. Frank spoke to the chairman, and then spoke to Gary Peters, who was Shrewsbury manager. They wanted a million pounds for him. Frank said no.’
His instinctive laughter at the nature of the misjudgement provided an exclamation point to the tale: ‘Man City were always very, very interested. They got him for six hundred grand. It didn’t work in our favour, but that deal is a good example of how we get players. We build up a network of contacts, managers, other scouts, agents and coaches. I’m constantly scanning the internet. I know this is old school, but I also love a newspaper. I’m continually looking for information on players. You also need to be a talker to be in the game. You need to network. If you don’t, you’ll struggle to get back in when you are on the outside, looking in. When my manager friends lose their jobs I always tell them to get to games. A lot of directors ask us about coaches and managers. They want to know who is being seen on the scene. They ask who we would recommend for a job. The flip side is we also get a lot of managers calling us, regarding players. It is the usual stuff – “do you know so and so, what do you think about him, anything I should know” – but it makes the world go round.’
The read on Butland’s character was promising, despite his adolescent slovenliness. He was self-sufficient from the age of 14, insisting on making a two-and-a-half-hour train journey from Bristol to Birmingham alone, three times a week. He refused to burden his parents with the chore of driving him there, though it would have taken half the time. He spent all day Tuesdays and Thursdays training with goalkeeping coach Dave Watson, but still passed all his GCSEs, earning two A grades, six Bs and a C. His most difficult decision came at 16, when he gave up rugby, much to the disappointment of his father, whose own rugby career was ended by a car accident.
For the first half, at least, Butland would be a distant figure. Southend herded the scouts into two executive boxes in the left-hand corner of the main stand, between the by-line and the edge of the penalty area. They had the feel of monastic cells, and were obviously difficult to market. Two rows of chairs were set out before a grimy picture window, but only those seated at the front had an uninterrupted view of the far end of the pitch. Even then, those on the right-hand side of the box had to squint through a forest of supportive posts.
Ewan Chester, Birmingham’s chief scout, popped in to pinch a team sheet and assess the level of interest. A dapper man in a dark raincoat, he had spent more than 20 years in two spells at Rangers, where he was trusted implicitly by contrasting managers, Graeme Souness and Walter Smith. In this context, he was a cross between an auctioneer and a foster parent. His presence re-assured Butland that he had not been abandoned. He would also provide immediate feedback to Hughton and Watson on the value of Birmingham’s investment. ‘We watch Jack every game,’ he said. ‘We know he has got a big chance. He’s the best young goalkeeper I have ever seen. He’s unbelievably mature, as near a certainty as you can have.’
The first box was full. Ours, for some reason, contained only one other scout, Paul Dyer from Queens Park Rangers. A voluble character, in a full-length black leather coat, he had the bearing of a former military man; his gaze was firm, his posture was positive and though he smiled readily there was latent aggression in his eyes. At 58, he was making a living as a cabbie, and trying to deal with an enduring sense of betrayal. Colchester United, the club to which he had devoted the majority of his working life, had not only cast him aside. In his eyes, they had also defiled his dedication, by using it against him, at an employment tribunal:
‘I did everything for that club. I was there twenty three years and Paul Lambert blew me out. That meant nothing to him, and everything to me. Colchester is my club. I played there. I painted the roof of the stand during that long, hot summer, seventy-five, seventy-six wasn’t it? Imagine the heat that roof radiated. It was unbearable at times. I drove the minibus. I managed the reserves. I swept the dressing rooms. I put up the hoardings on the side of the pitch. I made them nine million on players when I was chief scout. What did that get me?’
The searing experience of having a claim for unfair dismissal rejected. The tribunal decided his employment began when he signed a contract in 2006 and not in 1991, as he argued, when he became part of the backroom team. He disputed the club’s insistence he was merely a volunteer for those 15 years. Colchester’s redundancy procedures were criticised as being ‘flawed’ but this was
deemed insufficient to allow the claim. Dyer had rejected £5,800, and then a further £2,000, from the club during the arbitration process. The price of service had a physical dimension; like many former footballers of his generation, he suffered badly from arthritis:
‘I was a bite and scratch midfield player. They used to say Kevin Beattie at Ipswich was hard. I used to have him in my pocket. Alan Hunter always used to say I was the biggest pain in the arse he played against. I put it in every day, every game. I kept fucking going. When I was injured they put morphine directly into the joint to stop the pain. My knee was like a building site. I told them to clear out all the shit and still went back for more. I was in more pain than I had ever been in my life.’
There was a telling wistfulness to his reminiscence, which ended as the teams filed out to a welcome which failed to match the hysteria of the public address announcer. An athlete’s career is like a phantom limb, which can still be sensed by an amputee. It leaves a spiritual void. Dyer, jolted back into the present by proximity of the kick-off, didn’t need to ask about the nature of Johnson’s mission. It was of marginal significance since he was concentrating on full back Lee Hills, who had been loaned to Southend by Crystal Palace for the last two months of the season. The word was that he would be released in the summer. ‘He’s worth a look,’ the scout rationalised. ‘The Premier League might have gone for him but Mick Jones, who knew him at Palace, reckons he’s not bad.’
Johnson leaned forward slightly in his seat as he focused on the far end of the pitch, where Butland was a light blue speck. ‘I’m waiting for him to come off his line and catch it,’ he muttered as the home side, emboldened by the early dismissal of Cheltenham full back Sido Tombati for a lunge on Michael Timlin, put the goalkeeper under pressure from a series of set pieces. Though let down by his defenders, who allowed Kane Ferdinand to score with an unchallenged shot, five yards out, in the 28th minute, he was failing to command his penalty area. A night which had begun badly was destined to get much, much worse.
Butland’s first major error extended Southend’s lead before half-time. He made the elementary mistake of failing to get his body behind a swerving shot by Ryan Hall. The ball nestled in the centre of the goal in tacit admonition of the blunder. Unnerved by the calamity, the goalkeeper became increasingly static. ‘This is why you go to games,’ Johnson said, to Dyer’s murmured approval. ‘Jack needs to be getting plenty of games, playing for a team with something to play for instead of a meaningless development squad. Cheltenham want to go up, and he’s with old pros who’ll tell him: “Sort it. We want to win this for the fucking bonus.”’
Butland, last off at the break and first to return, was now in our eyeline. His features were suddenly distinct. It was disarmingly simple to read his body language. Bizarrely, he released his nervous energy by bouncing up and down in the team huddle which presaged the second half. It was an arresting sight, almost as if he was trying to trigger a hokey-cokey, but the levity of the moment was soon lost. Southend should have been 3–0 up almost immediately; Butland was rooted to his line as Eastwood, in his first game at Roots Hall for five years, missed a simple header from a Hills cross.
The agony of self-doubt deepened in the 51st minute when Eastwood controlled Hall’s long ball, cut inside, and attempted a speculative shot, which went in off Butland’s right arm. ‘Oh Jack,’ Johnson exclaimed, as the magnitude of the misjudgement sank in. ‘What a nightmare.’ The mental degradation was almost complete. Butland’s inner turmoil began to affect his kicking. Usually it was one of the better elements of his game; he was comfortable on the ball, which he struck with a languid grace that evoked comparisons with a finely honed golf swing. Now he began to unravel technically. He was slicing his clearances and goal kicks with the undisguised desperation of a weekend hacker. It was no real surprise when, midway through the second half, Butland dived over a straightforward 20-yard shot by Bilel Mohsni.
‘This is the real world,’ said Dyer, breaking an uncomfortable silence.
‘If I didn’t know him I would have crossed him off, but I know he is better than this,’ replied Johnson.
‘He’s eighteen. He’s only a baby. He’s got twenty more years ahead of him as a goalkeeper, at least.’
‘I know, but what worries me is his heart. He looks right – he has great size, all the attributes – but does he have that inner strength?’
For me, it was a moment of epiphany. The scout’s trick, of concentrating on an individual with a lover’s intensity, was becoming instinctive. The colours of the crowd began to coalesce. Eventually they were as monochromatic as the floodlights, set against the inky darkness of the night sky. The chants were muffled to the point of inaudibility. Senses were subjugated, yet heightened. My field of vision was filled by a big boy, lost. Butland exuded a touching vulnerability. His unconscious act of chewing the neckband of his shirt was a child-like gesture, which radiated fearfulness and isolation. He would periodically exhale so violently that his chest heaved, and his breath condensed in the cold air. He attempted to maintain appearances by barking orders at his defenders, but they, too, were being consumed by the quicksand of self-doubt.
Dyer was impressed by Hills, who would eventually sign for another interested witness, Stevenage manager Gary Smith. Like Johnson, Dyer prepared to leave with ten minutes still to play. He had a late-night fare to pick up at Stanstead airport. ‘Regular punter,’ he reported. ‘He comes in from Gibraltar, with plenty of readies. Always pays in euros. Ask no questions, eh?’ Johnson smiled, and said his goodbyes. His report would be in the Anfield system by 2 a.m. He felt the night had to be put into the context of Butland’s previous excellence. His view, together with video clips of the goals, stimulated immediate debate about the nature of Liverpool’s interest. Achterberg, in particular, was unimpressed. But first, Johnson had to deal with a text message from Mark Cartwright, Butland’s representative. ‘Not a good scoreline. How was Jack?’ it read. The reply was brief, but heartfelt: ‘Don’t ask.’
Destiny beckoned, with a wink and seductive grin. Anyone who suggested, at that moment, in the early hours of March 31, 2012, that within five months Butland would become England’s youngest goalkeeper, after playing for Team GB in the Olympic Games, would have been humoured, pitied or sent to lie down with a soothing mug of cocoa. Yet football has an infinite capacity to amaze and appal. Providence had its eye, also, on Liverpool.
The following Friday, Good Friday, Johnson picked up Damien Comolli at Gatwick airport. The Frenchman had been summoned to the United States to see Liverpool owner John W. Henry, where he presented an overview of the club’s redevelopment. He and the scout to whom he was most closely aligned ran a final check on Crewe’s Nick Powell in a 1–1 draw at Crawley Town. They left when he was substituted eight minutes from time, discouraged by well-sourced intelligence that Manchester United intended to activate their option to sign him, for a fee of £4 million.
The weekly conference call between the main players in the recruitment department took place, as usual, on the Tuesday, after the extended holiday weekend. On Wednesday Comolli was called into another emergency meeting, in Liverpool city centre. On Thursday Liverpool’s official website was leading with a preview of the weekend’s FA Cup semi-final against Everton, featuring Steven Gerrard. It was entitled ‘Make yourself a hero.’ Then, in early afternoon, it carried a fateful four-paragraph statement:
Fenway Sports Group and Liverpool FC confirmed today that Director of Football Damien Comolli has left the Club by mutual consent.
Principal Owner John Henry said: ‘We are grateful for all of Damien’s efforts on behalf of Liverpool and wish him all the best for the future.’
Liverpool Chairman Tom Werner added: ‘The Club needs to move forward and we now have a huge game on Saturday. It is important that everyone joins us in supporting the manager and gets behind Kenny and the team and focuses on a strong finish to the season.’
Damien Comolli commented: ‘I am grateful to have b
een given the opportunity to work at Liverpool and am happy to move on from the Club and back to France for family reasons. I wish the Club all the best for the future.’
Johnson was at home, setting up a DVD, when he received a call from Andy Stevens, one of Liverpool’s part-time scouts. ‘Have you seen Sky Sports News?’ he asked, breathlessly. ‘If not, get it on.’ As Johnson did so, with a mounting sense of dread, he instinctively flicked on to his emails. There, in his inbox, was an unread message from Comolli: ‘Thank you for all your hard work. I will contact you soon.’ The rest of the day sped by in a blur. Shock quickly mutated into alarm:
‘Bloody hell. Where do I start? The phone, text and email has gone mad. I’m ploughing through the messages, getting back to people. It’s a massive shock. Everything looked OK. After Damien’s meeting with the owners in the States we were talking about our plans, players and money. We carried on as normal. He sent me an email about targets yesterday and then, bang. I know this is football and you shouldn’t be shocked but . . .’
Insecurity has an avalanche’s speed and destructive power. It swallows people, whole. Steve Hitchen was immediately besieged by his network of international scouts. All were anxious, yet aware their contacts were transferable. If they were surplus to requirements, they had arrangements to make. Hitchen sought an early meeting with the Liverpool hierarchy to stress the scouting staff’s need for reassurance. Airy public statements, reiterating support for Kenny Dalglish, were of limited relevance. Lines of communication were fractured, and Chinese Whispers multiplied. The sacking of Peter Brukner, the club’s head of sports medicine and science, and suggestions that Achterberg would be moved on at the end of the season, were ominous. ‘We just don’t know who is going to be our boss,’ said Johnson. ‘We will be seen as Damien’s men, but all of us want to stay at Liverpool Football Club, if they want us.’