Four months ago, Olly Lancashire was told by Crewe Alexandra that he was being released at the end of the season. Aged 32, Lancashire had several offers to continue a career that rewarded him with almost 300 appearances across every division in the Football League. But, while taking a few days out to consider his next options, he received a call from Matt Crocker.
Lancashire had known Crocker for years. He was his academy manager as he came through the system at Southampton. When Lancashire had enrolled for a masters in sporting directorship, he reconnected with Crocker who by then had become Southampton’s director of football. Crocker phoned with an offer: continue your playing career, but give up life in a first-team squad. Lancashire would become Southampton’s first “support player”.
“It came pretty much out of the blue,” Lancashire tells i. “I had offers to keep playing in the EFL, but as soon as I heard it I felt like this opportunity, to come back to my first club and to help with my transition out of playing for the next step in my career, made total sense.
“Matt wanted someone who knew how Southampton operated, who knew the principles of the club, who had come through the academy themselves and so knew what it demanded of a person and who had gone on to gain experience playing a number of years in the Football League. I fitted that specification, but I was certainly very grateful that he approached me.”
When Lancashire began his professional career in 2007, English football still operated with a structure that contained first teams and reserve sides; youth teams fed into both. He remembers training and playing with senior professionals in the reserves, leaning on them for advice. But with the introduction of Under-23 teams, replacing the previous reserve leagues, a disconnect formed. Academy players can often lack contact with senior first-team players until they have turned 21. Lancashire describes the obvious potential for a culture shock that can unnerve and even hold back academy graduates.
Enter the support player. Manchester United have Paul McShane as a player-coach, Brighton have Gary Dicker in the same role. Lancashire is purely a playing member (although he is working towards his Uefa coaching badges), but the responsibility is the same: he plays and trains alongside the Under-23s, a glaring but deliberate exception to the age rule. He is their leader on the pitch and a role model and mentor off it. At a time when mental health awareness is ever increasing, that support for young players can be crucial.
“My job is to set the standard,” Lancashire says. “I have to show them the day-to-day behaviour that is expected of a footballer, whether you’re in a Premier League first team or in League Two. It’s helping to create an environment around them so there are no surprises, drilling down into these young lads what it takes to have a career in the game. Ultimately my job is to teach young players what challenges they are likely to face and what is needed beyond talent to become a successful footballer.
“It’s really beneficial for them to build up a relationship and build up trust with someone who does have a wider footballing experience; they are always asking questions. It could be about matches, different teams or managers that I played for or off-field issues you have to consider. They can pick my brains on any topic and I can answer questions that they simply wouldn’t have even asked before or that coaches wouldn’t necessarily have the same insight on.”
Although McShane, Dicker and Lancashire are still playing most weeks, this is a role that takes some getting used to. Life as a first-team player is one of immediate feedback and judgement: training for a Saturday, assessed on on-pitch performance and league position, continuous lurches between relative glory and failure that can shift over a matter of weeks. Life as a support player is far different; nobody cares how many tackles you make or goals you score. Making the instant shift from League One to Under-23 football can be difficult.
“For the first month or six weeks, especially when the season started and Crewe were playing League One and I was training to play in Under-23 games, it was quite difficult to get my head round,” he says.
“But now I’m loving it. The coaching staff are helping me to do my coaching badges and with my personal development and I can’t thank the club enough for that.
“But this is all more of a gradual process than ever before. I’m working with two players now who I think could be superb, and ideally I’d like to push them up into the first-team picture or get them out on loan. But that’s very difficult to do quickly. This is not about instant success. We’re working here for the next two, five, ten years.”
When talking to Lancashire, and hearing about the impact support players have had elsewhere, it’s hard not to assume that this is the inevitable future. Life in a Premier League academy is full of hope and dreams, but there can be an underlying fear of rejection and uncertainty as to where you land next when the dreaded news arrives; for the majority that news is an inevitability. Providing young people with designated mentors has been successful in other areas of life; why wouldn’t the same be true here?
“I get to help other people and I constantly feel as if I am making a real difference to their lives,” Lancashire concludes. “The players already realise how I can add value to their careers. “Ultimately, a football club is trying to develop footballers, but it goes way beyond that. You’re preparing them for their rest of their lives, developing excellent people who are provided with all the tools to fulfil their potential wherever life takes them.”
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3nXKhnB
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