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I watched Angus Gunn playing for Norwich yesterday.

He is getting first team experience and is looking very confident which will keep him ahead of Woodman in the England rankings.

Unless something comes about in the next couple of days, I think this will have been a wasted year in Woodman's development.

 

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5 hours ago, skygod said:

I watched Angus Gunn playing for Norwich yesterday.

He is getting first team experience and is looking very confident which will keep him ahead of Woodman in the England rankings.

Unless something comes about in the next couple of days, I think this will have been a wasted year in Woodman's development.

 

Surely Gunn is Scottish?Or at least could be?

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He could be but he has opted for England so far.

"Bryan (Gunn) told MailSport: 'I’ve had the England thing to deal with for a few years now. It got closer to reality when Angus was selected at U16, U17, U18 and U19 level.

'But we’re now nearing the moment of truth when he won’t have a choice. At the moment, Scotland is still an option.

'But in Angus’ mind he’s been born and brought up in England. That’s his chosen country.'"

 

 

 

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There can’t be many of those players from the successful England age groups getting regular first team football at the moment. Calvert-Lewen at Everton was but Big Sam looks to be pushing him out the first team. Abraham started the season as first choice striker at Swansea but isn’t the obvious choice anymore. There were a few of us down at Swansea vs Newcastle earlier in the season and Newcastle fans were desperate for Woody to get game time as they don’t rate the other keepers and prefer to give youth a chance.

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Jonjoe Kenny has played quite a bit at Everton, I think, as has Lewis Cook at Bournemouth.

Was Holgate of Everton not in the squad too? Solanke has played a little bit for Liverpool too.

Walker-Peters has played a bit at Spurs. Josh Onomah of Spurs on loan at Villa and Maitland-Niles at Arsenal.

I think quite a few of them have had decent first team outings.

 

Edited by skygod
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An interesting piece by David Walsh in The Times from last June:

 

It is hard to say where it began — Mitcham train station in south east London probably. Thirty years ago. Teenage footballers with an ambition that hung like a cloud over them. They were on Crystal Palace’s books. Waiting for the train the younger one tossed orange peel on to the track while making his friend laugh. In serious moments the conversation cut to the chase.

“Do you think the manager fancies me?”

“Yeah mate, course he does.”

The older one went on to play 57 times for England. He is now the England manager. You could say the younger one was luckier than Gareth Southgate but that is black humour. Seven years the younger one spent at Selhurst Park, an aspiring goalkeeper who did not start one competitive game for the first team.

After that he hit the road and made his career at Exeter, Northampton, Brentford, Southend, Colchester, Oxford United, Stevenage, Rushden & Diamonds, Thurrock and a couple of clubs that even he has forgotten. After training they washed their own gear. For away games they ate at motorway services. When his career was at its peak, he earned £50,000 a year and drove to training in a Ford Ka.

All of that he could handle. He was not brought up to expect privilege. What got Andy Woodman was that he had had a chance but didn’t make the most of it. He earned £27.50 a week as an apprentice at Crystal Palace at a time when he could hustle four or five times that in a couple of hours at a local snooker hall.

No one ever told him about there being a bigger picture.

There were compensations for the career he might have had. He married Anna, a good woman. They had two children. Freddie and Isobelle.

Six or seven years ago Freddie told his father that all he wanted in life was to be like his father. A goalie. “Son, we need to talk,” the father said.

What Andy was about to say would shape the boy’s life.

 

They played in the Under-20 World Cup final at the World Cup Stadium in Suwon, South Korea on Sunday last. England against Venezuela.

Seventeen minutes from time, with England leading 1-0, their opponents were awarded a penalty. A teammate gave the ball to the striker Adalberto Penaranda.

Back on his goal line, Freddie Woodman pressed a button inside his head. Up came many of the penalties he had watched Penaranda take. Another button and he was looking at the notes he had written about the Venezuelan’s penalty-taking.

A few of Penaranda’s penalties had gone down the middle. But earlier in the tournament he went middle to right, that awkward position. The striker was close to being his team’s best player because he was confident and prepared to do something different. The note that Woodman had written concerning Penaranda said, “Move late. Stay up as long as you can.”

Woodman thought Penaranda would go middle right and moved at the last moment. He stayed alive, though, to the possibility that the Venezuelan would go straight down the middle so when he did, the goalkeeper was ready to shoot his left arm back and with an open palm he batted the ball away from his goal.

It was an outstanding save.

We are speaking in the conservatory of the man he calls “Pops”, who is his grandfather John Clifford. Also present are Les and Ivy Bates whom he calls “Granddad” and “Nan”. They are his great grandparents, now in the 74th year of their marriage. The Under-20 World Cup winners’ medal hangs round Ivy’s neck, Les holds the golden glove trophy that Freddie received for the tournament’s best goalkeeper.

When Les was Freddie’s age he was a sailor on a Royal Navy minesweeper heading for Normandy, a few days before the D-Day landings. Les wants to hear his great-grandson’s every recollection of the campaign in South Korea. From the beginning they knew Freddie had something about him.

It was Mr Bruce, a teacher at his school, who arranged a trial at Crystal Palace. Freddie was 12. He and Mr Bruce still speak. When the good news came Freddie told Andy, “I got it, I got it. A two-year schoolboy contract.” His dad remained calm.

“That’s good son but it’s not the one that matters. It’s the next one, a professional contract.”

That began years of goal-setting. Targets were identified, time frames agreed.

Freddie was 14 when Newcastle United made him their player. At St James’ Park he would work with his father, who was the goalkeeping coach at the club, though at first the boy thought it was a bad idea.

“I didn’t want to be the one that people said, ‘he’s only here because of his dad’. I look back and realise how stupid a thought that was. Working with him was one of the best things that happened to me.

“Firstly, he is the best coach I have worked with. I also need to pay a lot of respect to first-team goalie Tim Krul who has done so much for me. He was like my on-field coach and my dad would teach me all the off-the-pitch stuff.

“My first visit to Newcastle, it was snowing. Horrible. I knew I’d lose a lot of the friends I’d made at school in south London. Then I saw the stadium and was just blown away. I was like, ‘I need to sign for this club’.”

Another favourite memory is of an afternoon in the boot room, just him and Andy chatting when the then United midfielder Yohan Cabaye walked in and picked up on Freddie calling Andy “Dad”. “Why do you call him Dad,” he asked.

“Because he’s my father,” Freddie said.

“No, cannot be,” said Cabaye. “None of us know this.” This was how he and Andy wanted it.

Andy guided the boy’s career in the way the legendary baseball coach Tommy Lasorda once advised. “Managing is like holding a dove in your hand. Squeeze too hard and you kill it, not hard enough and it flies away.” The time would come when it was safe for Andy to open out his hands.

Freddie has played for all the England underage teams. Thirty times he’s sat on the bench for Newcastle United and still he waits for his time. Andy marvels at the way the boy has grown into a young man. When strength and conditioning coach Chris Wilding left Newcastle, Freddie paid from his own pocket to continue working with him.

Then he worried about what he was not doing on the mental side. After a six-hour meeting in the cafe at St Mary’s Cathedral across in the centre of Newcastle he asked Steve Black, Jonny Wilkinson’s former guru, to take him on. They have been together since.

On the first day Black asked him if he read much.

“I said, ‘no I don’t read, I have never read a book in my life’. He gave me Legacy, a book about the All Blacks. That’s become my favourite book, ever. I have read it about ten times now. I’ve become an obsessive readers of books, and I regret I didn’t pay more attention in school.”

His punishment for that is all the words he has to Google.

Freddie loved the connection between the All Blacks and their people, their land. “I am quite patriotic and I love England. I remember getting an England captain’s armband off Gareth [Southgate] when I was a kid. It was too big for me so I had to pull it up almost to my shoulder. I have got that framed now.”

Black suggested he keep a journal. “From January 1 up to the World Cup final, everything got written down. What I was eating, what I was drinking, how I was sleeping. I tracked everything. I weigh all my food. It says in Legacy that the little things make the big difference. That has stayed with me.”

In the changing room before putting on his England shirt for the World Cup final in Suwon, he looked at the name on the back. Woodman. He thought if he had a bad game Pops would get stick from his mates at the golf club, his sister Isobelle would be affected when she went to work in London and his parents would have to deal with stuff.

Wanting things to be good for them made him stronger.

Three days after the World Cup final Andy saw something on the internet. Kilmarnock manager Lee McCulloch spoke about Freddie in the Daily Record because the young goalkeeper had spent the second half of last season on loan at Rugby Park.

“Freddie deserves all of his success,” McCulloch said, “because he has the best attitude I have ever seen in football. Seriously.”

Andy read that and recalled the conversation when Freddie first said he wanted to be a professional footballer. “One condition,” his father had replied, “you don’t do it like I did it.” Freddie agreed.

The boy has been as good as his word.

 

Edited by skygod
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6 hours ago, skygod said:

Jonjoe Kenny has played quite a bit at Everton, I think, as has Lewis Cook at Bournemouth.

Was Holgate of Everton not in the squad too? Solanke has played a little bit for Liverpool too.

Walker-Peters has played a bit at Spurs. Josh Onomah of Spurs on loan at Villa and Maitland-Niles at Arsenal.

I think quite a few of them have had decent first team outings.

 

Kenny has but just filling in till Coleman’s back, good player though gives everything for the jersey.

Tom Davies played well last season but hasn’t hit the ground running in his 2nd season.

Holgate is cementing his place at CB at the minute.

Alot of good young players at Everton, Calvert Lewin, Lookman, Vlasic, Pickford

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