This weekend I achieved a career first. As I looked around at the squad assembling for our team warm-up at Quarndon on Sunday, I realised that I was in fact the oldest player in the team. While this admittedly was a blow to my self-esteem (I always pride myself on being ‘down with the kids’), it also emphasised to me the youthful vigour that is filling the Kimberley dressing room this season.
Alan Hansen famously said that “you will never win anything with kids”. As a Manchester United supporter, I was of course delighted to see Fergie's Fledgling's rip apart that ludicrous assumption in the 1995-96 season as a team filled with Beckham, Scholes, Butt, Giggs and the Neville brothers romped to a league title. To be fair to Hansen, his statement was perhaps more driven out of the fact that it was a big surprise for Ferguson to sell Paul Ince, Mark Hughes and Andrei Kanchelskis in the summer before the season began.
 |
| Alan Hansen back in 1995 made his statement after United lost their opening game to Aston Villa. They went on to do the double of Premier League and FA Cup. |
Similarities can be drawn to our position at Kimberley. There is no doubt that Hansen would be looking at us and thinking, ‘well how are they going to replace the likes of Birch, Patel and Wright’. What Alan missed back in 1995 however, was something that one of my favourite coaches, Australian Ric Charlsworth, summed up beautifully in his book, The Coach. For Charlsworth, building successful teams requires a blend of ingredients with one of the most important things being to ‘ignore youth at your peril’. There is no doubt that this year we have taken that philosophy to the max!
Its success is dependent on something else that Alan was unable to see in the August of 1995, and that is the quality and hunger of the group of young players. Having worked through the winter in my new capacity as Coach with these boys, and seen them in the first few games of the season, I have huge confidence that they can go on and put in some head turning performances this season. What is going to be the litmus test for the group though, is can they do it under pressure and crucially, when it counts.
So far, the results have been promising. At 2 for 2 on Saturday, it did look a little bleak, but a brilliant 112 from 20 year old Paldip Sidhu and assured 42 from 18 year old Dominic Brown took us to a position from which we could compete. Off spinner Alex King, at just 19 years old, took 7 wickets across the weekend, and on Sunday 16 year old Harry Ratcliffe put in a faultless performance behind the stumps. With other vital contributions from the likes of Dominic Wheatley, who steered us home on Sunday, and from James Mann, who set up the platform for that success, there are signs that these young players have got what it takes to turn potential into wins and points.
There is no doubt it will be a season with ups and downs. Our challenge is not to get too low when we struggle or believe our own hype when things go well, but to look to learn something from every game. If we can do that, maybe we can surprise a few people along the way.
