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| Leicester City academy director Jon Rudkin with young trainees at the BTA Complex on Thursday. Picture by Santosh Ghosh |
Calcutta: It’s not the kind of opportunity every Indian team gets before embarking on an international tournament.
But the under-17 boys will have the rare opportunity of playing a host of practice matches against their Leicester City counterparts as part of their preparations for the final round of the AFC U-17 championships in September.
Informing this, Nigel Empson, the CEO of FMM International, the company which brokered the deal between Leicester City and the All India Football Federation on youth development and exchange programmes, said: “We have planned for such an exposure trip for the boys sometime in summer. I hope it will provide the Indian team the necessary impetus to do well in the AFC meet.”
He, however, added that the dates and the number of matches haven’t been finalised, though it will be done very soon.
Meanwhile, Jon Rudkin, the director of the Leicester City academy, who is currently in the city to have a look at the preparations of the India U-17 team for the AFC meet, said he needs more time to make a proper assessment of the boys. “See, four days is too short a time…What we need is to work on a long-term basis,’ Rudkin said.
Still, “on-the-ball movements” of the Indian boys has impressed the director of the academy, which has produced the likes of Peter Shilton and Emile Heskey. “We want to work on the allround ability of the boys so that they shape up as quality players,” Rudkin said.
“The game has changed and it needs stronger players…A Maradona is an exception. We’ve to work towards producing players who are physically strong enough to burden the challenge.”
He informed that the Leicester City academy has three physiotherapists who work on this aspect. “We also have four full-time coaches, two recruitment officers, one education officer and 12 part-time coaches in our.”
Elaborating on the modus operandi of their academy, Rudkin added: “We’ve boys in different age-groups from 8-19. When they reach 16, we choose a few and give them a contract.”
It’s the junior outfits that each Premier League (or for that matter, a first division team) nurture that provide quality footballers at a later stage.
“The top Indian clubs should seriously look into it,” he said. “And the junior teams should follow the training methods laid down by the senior sides.”
In fact, it is this uniformity that the senior India coach Stephen Constantine also harped on. He is also in the city to take a look at how the U-17 team is preparing for the AFC meet.
“May be, I won’t be around in five to 10 years time, but a structure should be in place by then which will help in the production of quality footballers,” Constantine said. Is the under-17 team coached by Jahar Das not following the methods laid down by him? “I don’t want to comment,” Constantine evaded the query.
It can be noted that Das and Constantine are not in the best of terms… In fact Das had made it clear after India made the final round that if Constantine goes to Japan, he won’t be there.