Some time ago when Rio Ferdinand was still playing for Manchester United, he bumped into his old youth coach Tony Carr.
For those not aware of Carr and his influence on the game, it’s not hyperbolic to describe him as one of football’s greatest youth coaches. The 71-year-old was West Ham’s academy chief for almost half-a-century, credited with bringing through Ferdinand, Frank Lampard, Joe Cole, Michael Carrick and countless others.
So when Ferdinand ran into Carr after a game some two decades after they worked together, the first thing he asked was, “Are you still doing third man running?” then started laughing. We are, Carr replied. “It never left me,” Ferdinand said.
Third man running goes something like this. Three players form a triangle, the apex with back to the target area, two on the base facing forwards. In training, Carr would take one of the base points. He passes into the apex, who passes back. While the ball is moving, the third player makes a run beyond the apex and Carr finds them with a pass. All one-touch, practised over and over.
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Threaded throughout are Carr’s interviews with some of his most successful protégés. And, naturally for somebody who worked in youth development for 43 years, they include critiques of the academy system.
Sitting down with Ferdinand, the former defenders recalls how different life was for teenagers. “We were thrown in and around the men, so you had to sink or swim,” Ferdinand says. “You had to clean their boots and that was such a big thing because you got grounded straight away. There was a hierarchy. Now the top boy in the youth team thinks he owns the place because there is no one looking down on him, keeping him in check.”
“And he drives a Range Rover!” Carr adds.
“Exactly,” Ferdinand replies.
It’s certainly a differing experience to a young Lampard who recalls being phoned by his uncle, Harry Redknapp, and told he was going on loan to Swansea. “I s__t myself,” Lampard says. “I had just passed my driving test and I didn’t know where Swansea was! I had a Ford Fiesta and he said he wanted me there in time for training tomorrow.”
Lampard, now Everton manager, believes there is a balance somewhere. “I remember you [Tony] used to call us back in because Rio hadn’t washed out the dressing room because he was a lazy so-and-so! It was great but it’s cheap just to say they should be cleaning boots. I think there’s a middle ground. There’s a big case for saying players should have responsibility and respect, and that’s lost.
“There was a period at Chelsea where we had a lovely pool built, where I would come in and see youth team players sitting in the jacuzzi on their phones as Drogba is just getting in. I remember thinking I wouldn’t have gone near Julian Dicks at the dinner table, let alone sitting in the jacuzzi on Instagram!”
Ferdinand is the latest former player to be hesitant regarding his own children. “My boys are in the system now and you see a lot of robots,” he says. “They’re all programmed to play a particular way. When I was young you saw players taking people on all day long. You had to tell them to stop doing it sometimes. Now the coaches are asking, ‘Please take someone on.’”
He adds: “They can be over-coached, and I’ve made a conscious decision with my boy, who is eleven, not to go into the system yet. One reason is because of his personality – I think he would get a bit big-time – and secondly, I want him to keep that rough edge. If you’re too polished, you almost have to be perfect to make it.”
Joe Cole, who did not sign youth terms with West Ham until 14, was left to concentrate on playground football that made him into a free-spirited player. Carr recalls Redknapp coming to watch Cole in an Under-12s game and being so impressed he called the gate man — known as “Dave the Gate” — to lock the gates and not let him leave until Redknapp had spoken to Cole’s parents.
“Football was a lot less of a business then,” Cole reflects. “You wouldn’t see a Premier League manager watching an Under-12 game now.”
In discussion with Carrick, the former Manchester United midfielder, we discover some Ferguson secrets. The day before a game the players would play a 15-minute 10 vs 10 match on a smaller pitch and Carrick recalls Gary Neville walking off afterwards saying: “That game is going to be harder than the Premier League game tomorrow.”
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It was after one session that Ferguson put his arm around an out-of-form Carrick and said that his last game in midweek “was your best performance of the season”, before dropping him.
“Even though he said he was resting me, I still felt 10 feet tall,” Carrick says. “It wasn’t as if I was walking out with my chin on the floor. I was like, ‘Thanks, boss!’ That is the magic of it.”
But Ferdinand’s summary of United’s cultural change sounds as though the magic has been lost. “Now I’m out, I can see for example the American influence on United. When I was at the club there were a handful of sponsors. Now there are a hundred or more. Twice a month now the training ground becomes a commercial compound where all the sponsors come and the players have to go through pods and all the commercial stuff. That’s the way it is. It’s not just football now. When you are getting paid that sort of money, your contract says you have to do so many hours a week commercially.”
It’s disheartening to read how Carr’s career ended on such bad terms, how he knew his time was up when Karren Brady replaced him with Terry Westley. West Ham were going to name him director of football until they discovered manager Sam Allardyce had it written in his contract that no such appointment could be made. So they came up with a different title but, less than a year into the contract, he was called by HR and felt forced out.
“I was upset and, after 43 years of unbroken service, I thought it could have been handled better,” Carr writes. “It may not have changed the outcome, but it would have shown some respect for a lifetime of dedication to the club. This wasn’t the West Ham United way that I thought I knew. So that was it after 43 years! It ended on a sad, unnecessarily bitter note.”
If Carr made West Ham over £100m from player sales during his career, that could double if Declan Rice, one of his latest and last successes, is sold before his contract runs down. And a value can’t be placed on what he is giving them on the pitch. It can be no coincidence that such a talented central midfielder is at the heart of successive unexpected Premier League top-four fights.
So it will probably only be in a decade or two that West Ham truly see how much they miss him.
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