By James Whittaker
Since the Bermuda Football Association unveiled it’s $36 million masterplan for the future of the national game one major question dominated the debate: Who would be appointed to the role of technical director — the man on whose shoulders the entire plan depends — and what was he going to do to bring the game back to its previous lofty heights?
Wild speculation about a host of big names from former England winger John Barnes to Jamaica’s World Cup coach Rene Simoes ensued.
In the end, it was a comparatively low-key appointment — Derek Broadley, the former Crystal Palace academy director.
Broadley is beginning to realize that he has the most talked about and, perhaps, the least understood position in Bermuda football.
When Keith Tucker questioned his international experience in an interview with the Bermuda Sun last week he inadvertently highlighted a popular misconception about the technical director’s role — that he is here primarily to work with the national team.
The headlines back it up. Flicking back through the papers over the six weeks since he’s been in the technical director’s chair, we read Broadley talking about the challenge of facing Cayman, Broadly organizing a national squad training camp at Fulham, Broadley looking ahead to the Trinidad game. During a World Cup campaign it is inevitable that the national team will dominate media coverage.
But despite those column inches Broadley concedes that beating Trinidad is nowhere near the top of his list of priorities.
He says that there is very little he can do to aid the 2008 World Cup bid and asks instead that he be judged in three or four years time on the success of the Under-15s, the Under-17s and the Under-20s.
“The reason I took this job was to build it from the bottom up. My expertise is not as a national team coach. “The reason I got given the job over other people was my youth development background, my teaching background, my coaching background. “I have proved that I can take players from a young age and turn them into professionals.”
Crystal Palace are starting to see the benefits of his work now. Almost half of their starting XI for the Championship play-off semi-final last week came through the club’s Centre of Excellence.
He believes Bermudian youngsters like Zeiko Lewis and Tre Ming have as much talent as the kids he coached in England.
And with the same academy style approach, the same opportunities could open up for our best young players.
“The approach to this job is the same as if I was an academy director or general manager at a big club in England. “The national team is your first team, your senior football is your reserve pool, the island is your youth academy and the grassroots is your football in the community.”
The physical headquarters for that ‘youth academy’ will be Gym Field, which is set to become a Centre of Excellence for the island’s top young players and the base from which he operates his coaching programmes.
It will be the training centre for all national teams — from under-11 through to the senior squad — and will be open for club coaches and anyone interested to come and see how the national coaching system works.
Just as important as the bricks and mortar is the philosophy, which underpins the academy.
Much of Broadley’s first six weeks at the Bermuda Football Association has been spent on face to face meetings with coaches and administrators around the island, refining and adapting his ‘football curriculum’ which will ultimately become the blueprint for football development in this country.
He’s a few weeks and a few meetings away from finalizing the document, but says it will be a Bermuda version of the programmes he ran at Palace and Reading (Pennsylvania).
The primary aim is to provide a syllabus of work, covering every stage of development from four to 17, for coaches to utilize — giving young players a complete footballing education.
“How many clubs currently have a comprehensive coaching syllabus? How many appoint a coach and leave it to chance that he knows what he is doing? I suspect mostly it’s the latter. “Football in this country needs to stop being a game of chance.”
Part of his plan will involve revamping the national programmes — trimming down squad sizes and developing specialist coaches at each age group.
“I’m not here to take over the national teams I’m here to put a staffing structure in place, to provide them with a blueprint on what we want to do at each level and to give them the tools to be successful. “We want all our youth national teams to be playing the same way and we want the club coaches and technical directors to try and replicate that at the domestic level. “The youth development system in this country is currently too disjointed.”
One of his chief aims at the real junior level is to harness what he describes as Bermuda’s ‘street soccer’ mentality and foster that freedom of expression and pure enjoyment of the game in a more structured environment.
“If you threw a ball to a bunch of 7-year-olds would they want to play or do drills. At that age you’ve got to make them fall in love with the game.“The game at a young age is very scruffy to watch, with big groups of kids running after the ball, but you have to let them play and learn to coach them as they play.”
The idea of ‘practice-play’ is a concept that has evolved in England over a number of years. John Cartwright, the former FA Academy director for England an old friend of Broadley’s, is an advocate. And the technical director is happy to admit that he is not ‘reinventing the wheel’ with his programme.
“I’m just bringing what is happening all over the world to Bermuda.” Some of it is shaped by his own beliefs about the global game: “I believe running with the ball is the core values in football. Look at the best players in the world — Ronaldo Ronaldinho, Henry — They can all run with the ball. Even John Terry needs to know how to manage and manipulate the ball on the move.” Other aspects are tailored to what he sees as specific gaps in the education of the typical Bermuda footballer. “One of the biggest problems I’ve identified with Bermuda footballers is they don’t know how to hit long passes. A consequence of that is not many players know how to head the ball. “We’re sending our players out to compete without all the tools we need. Putting a curriculum in place should give them the full toolbox.” He is also looking into restructuring the leagues with a ‘development league’ for 17-23-year-olds aimed at bridging the gap between youth and senior football, up for consideration.
“The BFA are paying me to have an opinion and I’ve got lots of them but I have to get the clubs to buy into it as well. “At times it can be a politician’s role. I think most of the clubs appreciate the need for change otherwise they wouldn’t have invested in me. “One of the reasons I think I may be able to succeed where others is failed is that I want to gradually evolve change.” Another ‘political’ challenge for Broadley is keeping a lid on expectations. Again, he emphasizes, the World Cup is not the priority. “All our hearts want us to beat Trinidad but the reality is they have 1.5 million people versus 60,000, it shouldn’t be all doom and gloom if we don’t go through.” So what’s a realistic expectation?
Consistently reaching the final stages of the Digicel Cup, success in the Island Games, producing a steady stream of U.S. college footballers, and having four or five players at top clubs overseas. “The coaching course I ran this month didn’t get much exposure, but that, to me, is more important than these Babados games (two upcoming World Cup warm ups). We qualified 36 coaches to NSCA state level. That’s a very good start. “It would be a bigger achievement to get 50 coaches qualified to a high level than to beat Trinidad. “It would be a bigger achievement to get four young players at top academies and 10-15 at college in the States than it would to beat Trinidad.
“That’s what I’m here to do.”
