The Glory Game by Hunter Davies

Author:Hunter Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub

13. SCOUTING FOR BOYS

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Charlie Faulkner is fifty-eight and very dapper with a cigarette-holder, suede shoes and a sparkle of gold teeth. He’s friendly and open with none of the tough no-nonsense attitude to outsiders which officials in football so often have. Charlie has been Spurs’ chief scout since 1966. For most of his working life before that he was a barber.

For eleven years he was a part-time scout with Brighton, doing it every weekend and every evening after barbering. For three years he was with West Ham. Looking back, he thinks he got round just as many matches in those days, by working round the clock.

Spurs have two full-time scouts – Faulkner and Dick Walker – who do nothing else but scout for the club. Then there are eight scouts who are exclusively under contract for Spurs. They have weekday jobs as well, as Charlie used to have, and range from teachers to office workers, but every Saturday and Sunday and several evenings a week they work for Spurs. These eight are scattered round the British Isles – two in the London area, two in Wales and one each in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Birmingham and Rotherham.

Spurs also use occasional freelance scouts, who are paid or given expenses to cover a match which a regular Spurs scout can’t get to. Each scout, of every level, has also got his own network of unofficial contacts, in schools, local leagues, youth organisations, factories up and down the country, who every year pass on information about hundreds of boys that Spurs might be interested in.

Players already playing for professional teams are of course scouted just as much as schoolboys and amateur players. This is the area which Charlie Faulkner specialises in – Dick Walker is more the specialist on schoolboys. Charlie is expected to know the name of every professional on the books of every Second, Third and Fourth Division team. Whenever a new name appears on a team sheet, he’s got to be scouted and a report made, just in case Spurs should ever be interested in him for any reason – either because they might want to buy him or simply because Spurs are going to play against his team.

Charlie doesn’t scout in the First Division. That’s Bill Nicholson’s area. Bill knows every First Division player. He has to, to brief the team each week before they play them, and also to keep an eye on likely players Spurs might want.

Every top football club has a similar scouting system, blanketing the country with their scouts and contacts, so the number of reports on players that flow into the clubs every week must run into thousands. It’s surprising that anyone ever gets missed. When it does happen, there’s usually an investigation. Ade Coker, for example, the young Nigerian star of West Ham, had recently appeared. All the old records and reports had to be looked up because Bill demanded to know why the Spurs scouting system hadn’t spotted him. It turned out he had been reported on, right from the beginning when the first tip-off came in.

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