The new poster boy of the back pages, Kemar Roofe, may well be magic (and wear a magic hat) as was sung lustily at the Kassam Stadium on Sunday, but why has it taken a televised cup game for a host of big clubs to notice? Yet again.
English sides have the financial muscle to set up scouting networks from Rio to Reykjavik, but they seem as surprised as everyone whenever a British ‘reject’ from their academy systems turns out to be, you know, quite good. The Vardy Effect, as we might now call it.
In the case of Oxford’s tricky forward, who knew? Well, no-one at West Bromwich Albion, it appears, save for former coach and now Oxford manager Michael Appleton, who has known him since he was 12.
The issue of young British players stagnating in expensive academies is becoming endemic and it’s only going to get worse. A friend’s son is seven years old and he’s good at football. Seriously good. So good that Manchester City came calling recently, with talk of their glittering new youth training facilities. Others clubs did too. Unsure of how to proceed, my friend sought advice from a mutual acquaintance – a recently retired footballer now on the coaching staff of one of the Championship’s larger clubs.
What he said was this. “City and Chelsea have the best academies in the country these days. The standard of coaching is excellent, but City and Chelsea are sweeping up kids like a vacuum and they have terrible records at getting them through to the team. That won’t change.”
And he’s right. If you’re a Premier League manager under constant pressure, only ever four games from the sack, what do you do when you have a vacancy for a left-back? Do you promote a kid from the academy, knowing that he needs games to settle or go out and buy an international footballer who’s ready right now.
The answer is almost always the latter. When 2016’s lunatic new TV deal kicks in, it will be the latter for the foreseeable future. Norwich, if they’re still up, will be richer than Milan or Valencia or Dortmund. Much richer.
It’s a no-brainer. Top flight managers don’t get time to build and if that kid from the academy fails, it’s the manager’s fault. If the international fails, the manager will be blamed too, but the player will take most of the flak.
Those of us who’ve been watching Kemar since he arrived in Oxford could have told you he’s a talent (as well as a nice, level-headed, humble lad and a real team player). You have to assume the folk at Albion knew that too, but would they give him a go? Would they hell. Presumably too busy scouting Salomon Rondon.
And there are other benefits to giving players like him a chance, rather than constantly shopping for new ones. Probably 20% of the people I know from my seat at the Kassam would say Oxford are their second club (I’m one of them). They go partly because of the way we all live now, often many miles from home, but also because it’s become too difficult to motivate themselves to pay £50+ (double that if you take your kids, as I do) to go and watch a bunch of transient, foreign multi-millionaires who have no real connection to the Premier League club in question, much less the town, and one eye on their next bank-breaking transfer.
The lads at Oxford aren’t like that. They don’t have the chance to be. Some of them such as Callum O’Dowda (another name for your notebooks) are local lads, but all of them are giving 100% every week for the team, for the shirt, for the fans. These days, with great new owners and a fantastic manager, Oxford are playing sparkling football, but even when it was awful not that long ago, the one thing that was never missing was effort.
Conference and League Two players have everything to strive for. For the young ones with talent, it’s a brighter future up the leagues. For the old pros and journeymen it’s paying the bills and hanging on to this life for as long as possible. It breeds a link between fans and players which is often lacking in the top flight.
There were a lot of scouts at the Kassam on Sunday to see how Kemar did against a Premier League defence (and to watch a few other Oxford players too). I hope his brilliant performance doesn’t lead to bids, but if it does I hope the daft buggers have to pay through the nose for a player they’ve probably got five versions of in their sprawling academies already.
If nothing else the irony would cheer me up.
You can follow James Clark on Twitter (@MotoClark)
