Oven-ready players deny room for grow-your-own talent to flourish

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/may/01/chelsea-john-terry-steven-gerrard-frank-lampard

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There will be a wistfully valedictory air to the end of this Premier League season as Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard make their last appearances in competitive English football, their distinguished careers – with more than 1,100 league appearances and a couple of hundred international caps between them, and a Champions League winners’ medal apiece – ending in just a hint of anti-climax.

Halfway through the season, the decision to invite the 36-year-old Lampard to remain with Manchester City for the second half of the campaign, by deferring his commitment to New York City FC, looked like a masterstroke. But who, as City’s season deflates like a leaky balloon, will now remember his short stay in east Manchester? As for Gerrard, until a fortnight ago it looked as though he might be bowing out with an appearance in the FA Cup final at Wembley on his 35th birthday. A resurgent Aston Villa put an abrupt end to that pretty fantasy.

There is a kind of poetry in this double disappointment, given the two players were linked for so many years by the debate over their ability to perform productively together in the same England side. That argument was definitively settled some time ago.

Their generation has not always found it easy to bring down the curtain. In his newspaper column on Thursday, Paul Scholes wondered aloud whether his decision to respond to Sir Alex Ferguson’s request to come out of retirement in January 2012, at the age of 37, had hindered the progress of Paul Pogba, then aged 18, to the extent of provoking the French prodigy’s departure from Old Trafford a few months later. Pogba’s vastly enhanced current transfer value, following what is about to be three consecutive Serie A titles with Juventus, underlines that mistake.

Gerrard, Lampard and Scholes will be watching a couple of their contemporaries ending the season in a very different mood. Chelsea’s first team, in the final stages of their reconquest of the Premier League, went behind to Leicester City on Wednesday but equalised and took the lead with goals from two players with a combined age of 71 – two days after Roman Abramovich had taken his seat at Stamford Bridge to watch the club’s next generation capture the FA Youth Cup for the fourth time in six years.

Didier Drogba, 37, and John Terry, 34, were pillars of the team who won the club’s first championship for half a century, José Mourinho’s first season at Chelsea. But who would have imagined, as they celebrated that first title 10 years ago this month, they would still be around to obstruct the progress of younger players?

Terry has been so outstanding this season many have found themselves unexpectedly regretting the incident with Anton Ferdinand that cost him his place in the England team three years ago. After coming through a period in which his powers seemed to be waning, he refocused his energies and learned the secret of turning age to his advantage. The wisdom acquired during 17 years as a professional gives him a better chance of anticipating where opponents may cause problems and of getting himself into a position in which he is likely to meet a breaking ball at the other end of the pitch, as we saw on Wednesday. If the numbers against his name on the Chelsea physio’s laptop are not as impressive as they once were, he knows how to compensate for the effects of decay.

It’s hard to imagine, then, that he will not answer the club’s decision to award him a one-year contract with another highly effective season, and perhaps even one more beyond that. As long as Terry commands the Chelsea defence, the 20-year-old Kurt Zouma and those lining up behind him, like the pair of 17-year-olds, Fikayo Tomori and Jake Clarke-Salter, who were singled out for special praise by the youth team’s coach, Joe Edwards, after Monday’s win over Manchester City, will have to wait their turn.

Terry is, notoriously, the last product of Chelsea’s youth scheme to establish a solid berth in the first team. This is not a matter of nationality. The team-mates surrounding him on the way to 11 major domestic titles in the Abramovich era, including fellow Englishmen such as Lampard, were all brought in as more-or-less finished products. During Carlo Ancelotti’s time at the club, a concerted attempt to introduce four homegrown players – only one of them English – ended in complete failure.

The smooth and confident performance on Monday certainly confirmed the quality of the work being done by the coaches of Chelsea’s junior teams. Mourinho has been making positive noises about some of the younger players and has even given one, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, a 6ft 4in 19-year-old in the Vieira/Pogba mould, a couple of brief appearances off the bench. Last summer Mourinho picked out Dominic Solanke, Izzy Brown and Lewis Baker as future England internationals, remarking he would be to blame if they failed to make it.

But the pressure will always be there to field teams filled with oven-ready players, already resilient enough to cope with the heat of competition at Champions League level. And Mourinho and others in his position may be willing to accept the blame if there is a bonus in the shape of substantial transfer fees for their carefully nurtured academy products, to be set against expenditure in the financial fair play ledger.

This time last year Greg Dyke dramatised his presentation of an FA commission report by revealing that in the whole of the 2013-14 season the clubs that had finished in the top four a year earlier had, between them, given just one England-qualified player his Premier League debut. That was Manchester United’s James Wilson, who played 64 minutes against Hull and scored two goals. This season the equivalent four clubs have between them given two players league debuts – but the pair in question, Loftus-Cheek and Arsenal’s 17-year-old midfielder Ainsley Maitland-Niles, received no more than one minute’s playing time apiece on the single occasion each was summoned from the bench.

Gerrard’s league debut for Liverpool came at the age of 18. He made 11 appearances in his first season and 29 in his second. Lampard’s first league match, for West Ham, came as a 17-year-old at the tail end of a season. He made 13 appearances in the following campaign and 31 the year after that. You would have to be sceptical about the chances of seeing their like again, at least in such numbers. Maybe they really were a golden generation, after all.