17 December 2007
VIDEO: England 8-7 Greece

England's Futsal team make history by claiming their first ever win 8-7 against Greece, Richard Follett with a wonderful winner


Firstly, a very happy New Year to everyone. I took the opportunity of a decent length break to have a well-deserved rest in Portugal after four months of coming and going ‘on the road’.

I couldn’t have gauged it better, with fantastic weather giving me a freaky experience of Christmas with warmth and sunshine, a reminder of the 2004 Futsal World Cup in Taipei, with people wearing santa hats in a tropical eighty-five degrees.

I spent time looking back on 2007 and ahead to 2008, where the F30 group will assemble at Lilleshall in a couple of weeks. My objectives are to pick up on the improvements made over the last six games of 2007 and to re-inforce our game strategy.

We have a couple of trialists coming in too, from the initial group of 72 that we first reviewed back in September. That ratio gives some indication of the number of players we have to sift through in order to find those with potential and there’s no guarantee that these lads will eventually make it.

Part of the objective for development is to create a conveyor belt of talent, a deep pool of resource which I can select from and this isn’t as simple as you might think. One of the hardest issues I find is getting the game to understand what we mean by ‘quality’ and rating that on a national scale rather than a parochial one. At the moment, I see it as a stop-start flow of players who have something, but maybe not everything, and the challenge is to find what they do have which, with our expertise, can be developed to attain the levels needed.

With the introduction of the regional leagues, this will hopefully act as a catalyst for introducing the new players we uncover to the domestic clubs, so the programme is not simply about England, it’s about finding players for Futsal in England.

Part of England’s slow progress last year was player availability and this highlights the many differences between being a club coach and a national coach. Session planning takes on a whole new meaning, especially when half the group is new each time – the result of many factors.

The international Futsal scene has been quiet throughout December which will all change in January as nations start final World Cup Qualification preparations. For us, it’s a few weeks before we leave for Kuala Lumpur and I’ll name the squad on Friday which TheFA.com will bring you exclusive news on.

One interview I did before Christmas was for BBC Sport where they questioned where will the English Cristiano Ronaldo come from, citing Futsal as the hidden secret. It emphasised what the rest of Europe already knows, in that this very gifted and talented young man, like so many of the foreign legion here in England, learned and refined his brilliant ball mastery and precision in Futsal during his formative years. I never tire of watching him, his brilliance with both feet, his confidence and his artistry.

So, when I got back home last week and caught up with the press clippings, I was humoured to see the various hacks citing the different techniques and peculiarities that Ronaldo undertakes when taking his magnificent free-kicks, from the influence of the valve in the ball to his sock position and so on.

I say humoured because by all accounts he is one of the finest professional players on the training pitch you’ll find, very similar to David Beckham, who Paul McGuinness the Youth Team Coach at Man United once told me would stay out hitting ball after ball. It’s no co-incidence that the two of them have exceptional free-kick abilities. But Sir Alex summed it up when he was asked how Ronaldo does it, “practice makes perfect” he said – “he practices 30 or 40 free-kicks every day at the end of training.”

The reality is that Ronaldo has a relationship with the ball, a comfort, a respect. He knows what it can do and what he can do to influence it and that comes from having so much contact with the ball from a very young age and experimenting without the fear of failure. I’m sure he will tell anyone that the Futsal ball helped him in that journey. Maybe it’s just his penalties that need some attention!

I was asked before Christmas why we hadn’t employed any foreign Futsal coaches as the perception was that this had slowed the development of the game here in England, something I have heard before. Now, I hear the argument but it’s one which we looked very closely at in the outset but I don’t agree, and the answer is found beyond the perception.

Consider the coach as being a master craftsman, somebody who relies heavily upon their tools to create their master piece. As coaches, the players are our tools and although we can visualise the picture or sculpture we want to create, despite our perceptions the tools are blunt, broken, missing, not up to the job or simply don’t work and that limits our ability to create that master piece. What we can do is make the best job with the tools we have, until we acquire the appropriate ones. And, there lies the overall challenge, developing the generation of players who understand Futsal and have the skill sets.

We have some very talented coaches here in England who understand young player development. What we have to do, and The FA Tesco Skills Coaches are already implementing this, is get Futsal onto the player education syllabus of every young player in England and that will better equip their skill base for their chosen pathway in the years ahead.

Another of our objectives has to be to develop our own coaches, but to invest the knowledge we gain from our travels and interactions around the globe to give them the armoury to develop the players takes time. That is the next phase of our coach development programme, which will come into place this year with the Level Two course. The game is getting further established as are the referees, but now we have to work on the coaches to ensure we all move forward together.

Finally, I’m delighted that my old mentor Roy Hodgson has got the recognition at home he deserves with his Fulham appointment. You will recall from a previous column that I met up with him in Porto in November, just before his last game as head Coach of Finland. Roy is considered one of the continent's most astute tactical thinkers, having enjoyed great success with Switzerland and Finland as well as with Italian giants Inter Milan, so it will be interesting to see how he does back at home.

Some have said that since his time in charge at Blackburn he has had to rebuild his reputation but I’m not sure that was the case as his astuteness and knowledge has been well known around Europe and beyond for a long time.  Anyone who can get a second spell at Inter doesn’t achieve that when rebuilding a reputation, they achieve it because of a reputation. Having been widely traveled in recent years with FC Copenhagen, Udinese, the national team of the United Arab Emirates and more recently with Finland, the Cottagers will be highly expectant of one of our greatest, yet broadly unknown foreign exports, and I wish him and assistant Mike Kelly the best of luck.

So, here we go 2008 – lets see what it brings us all!

Graeme.