DOMINIC FOLEY’S FIRST training session in Belgium was an eye-opener.
He joined Gent in 2005 as a player who scored goals at Premier League and international level over the course of a professional career that had already brought him to clubs in four different countries.
But on his first day on the job in East Flanders, Foley realised that he still had much to learn about the game he had been making a living from for the previous 10 years. In the midst of a footballing revolution that valued skill and technique above all other attributes, the Belgians believed there was a lot more to preparation than simply having players flex their athletic muscle during training matches.
“I would have done things in Belgium that were completely alien to me from my time in England,” Foley explains. “I saw a difference in the styles and patterns in training straight away. The encouragement to play the ball on the ground, that was immediately noticeable.
“They were different times and I’m sure they’re probably doing the same things in England now, but we spent 25-to-30 minutes at the start of every session on passing drills alone.
“You’re talking about the basics of football — getting your first touch right, putting the ball where you want it to go and moving on to it, perfecting the weight and accuracy of your pass, playing it in front of the player so they can run on to it… all these small things that are basic and which people presume are being done anyway, but they’re not.”
The path to Belgium — or any other league on the continent, for that matter — is not a well-trodden one for Irish footballers. But having already played in Greece and Portugal, as well as Ireland and England, Foley was open-minded when Gent made him an offer after being impressed by his performances against them for Bohemians in a two-legged Intertoto Cup tie in June 2005, which the Belgians won 3-2 on aggregate.
Gent manager Georges Leekens liked what he saw and signed the striker following a messy transfer saga which resulted in Foley terminating his contract with Bohs due to unpaid bonuses. During one of two spells as Belgium’s national team manager, Leekens presided over their qualification for the 1998 World Cup via a play-off at the expense of the Republic of Ireland.
Foley stayed in Belgium for seven years, which he describes as the “the best part of my career”. After four seasons with Gent, he moved on and spent three more with Cercle Brugge. By the time he returned to Ireland in 2012 and played for Limerick for a season before hanging up his boots, Foley had netted 50 times in 182 competitive games in Belgium.
Having led a nomadic existence in England, he enjoyed the feeling of being settled in the Jupiler Pro League. Just before he turned 19, Foley joined Wolves. Graham Taylor signed him for Watford in 1999 as they prepared for their first season in the Premier League, and he was a Hornets player for four seasons when Braga brought him to Portugal for a year in 2003.
But Foley’s time in English football was interspersed with loan moves — to Notts County, Queens Park Rangers, Southend United, Swindon Town, Oxford United and Ethnikos Piraeus in Greece. He grew accustomed to being on the move.
“I’m Irish, so the way I looked at it was that going to Portugal, Greece or Belgium was no different to going away from home to England at the beginning of my career because I was still going to another country which was a relatively short flight from home,” Foley says.
“I spent eight years in England, in and out of different teams. Everybody’s different but the style of football in Belgium just suited me. To be a footballer in England, you need to be an athlete first — be able to run 15 kilometres in a match and sprint up and down the field time and time again. Footballing ability seems to be a secondary factor.
“In Belgium, footballing ability will shine through because it’s all about playing the ball on the ground and trying to play it out from the back. They give you a chance to do that without kicking you up and down the field. The way of life out there was lovely too. I loved everything about my time out there. I’d have no hesitation whatsoever in advising other Irish players to go out there and try it instead of focusing solely on England.”
Soon after he arrived in Belgium, Foley became aware of the nation’s footballing revolution. A cash windfall from their co-hosting of Euro 2000 allowed the Belgian football federation to invest heavily in youth development, including the construction of a new national football centre.
Following a blueprint put together by Michael Sablon, Belgian football’s technical director, the federation — inspired by national set-ups in the Netherlands and France, as well as club structures like those at Ajax and Barcelona — abandoned a culture of defensive, counter-attacking football executed by teams set up in 4-4-2 or 3-5-2 formations, and insisted on offensive approaches by Belgium’s youth teams, all of whom played 4-3-3.
The federation began working directly with schools in order to increase their access to, and influence on, young players. Professional clubs followed suit. They also commissioned a university study which found that the emphasis at underage level had been too heavily geared towards winning games instead of developing players.
In a June 2014 interview with The Guardian’s Stuart James, Anderlecht’s director of youth — Jean Kindermans — said: “You have to know that tackling is forbidden in Anderlecht. You can only anticipate or intercept, until they come to [the] Under-21 team, in the second team of Anderlecht.
“Our main motivation is we want to create technically skilled football players. If our centre-backs try to provide a solution by tackling and putting the ball out, I don’t like it. I want to educate as good as possible: ‘When do I have to anticipate? When do I have to drop off?’ I want to create intelligent players, not butchers.”
Foley saw the results for himself. During his time in Belgium, he came up against some promising young players: Kevin De Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku, Vincent Kompany, Marouane Fellaini, Thibaut Courtois. They have yet to achieve major success as a national team, but Belgium now possess one of the strongest squads in international football.
That’s surely a direct consequence of the revolutionary blueprint, although Foley isn’t convinced that the conveyor belt of world-class talent emerging from Belgium will continue to keep The Red Devils among the favourites for honours at major tournaments.
“I was aware of what was going on there but, as has been said elsewhere, they’ve exceeded expectations,” he says. “If you look at the last ten years — not even ten, but five — and the amount of Belgian players that have arrived in the Premier League compared to before, is it a golden age for them or is it just a fluke?
“Will it ever happen again that they’ll have so many good players in the space of one short period? If it continues to happen then it probably is a result of their intervention and their strategy. But in my honest opinion, it might just be a fluke.”
Nevertheless, Belgium’s football philosophy left a lasting impression on Foley. As a coach, he’s now a Uefa ‘A’ licence holder and runs an academy near his home in Charleville, North Cork. Established by a couple of fellow former footballers — ex-Bohemians pair Neale Fenn and Matt Gregg — ‘Path2Pro’ also has an academy in Dublin.
According to Foley, the aim of the academies is “to give young players a pathway into the professional game” with the help of a network of contacts that has been built up over the years by the ex-players who are behind it.
“Young players join up with us for a 12-week camp, we give them all the coaching and training to prepare them for what they’ll face if and when they go on a trial,” Foley explains. “The idea is to improve them and bring them to a standard where they’re ready to do so. Obviously not everyone is going to be good enough but we do guarantee that we’ll improve them and have them going back to their clubs as better players.”
Foley has strong opinions about the quality of coaching in Ireland and the style of football that stems from it: “Even now with my own academy, I firmly believe that unless you can do all the basics right, there’s no point in talking about tactics, there’s no point talking about matches, there’s no point in anything. If your first touch isn’t right, your second touch is probably going to be a tackle. A lot of emphasis is put on first touch, pass and move.”
He adds: “I’m going on my own experiences with coaching and I get kids coming to me who have excelled with their clubs and are looking to go on trial. But it’s often evident to me that these kids, who are probably the best players at the club, have never had proper training.
“Now, it’s easy for us to say that we need to improve coaching at underage level, but who is actually going to do it? Because nine times out of ten it’s a father, an uncle or an older brother who put their hands up and say, ‘I’ll do it’. But the problem there is that these people have no coaching experience or qualification of any sort, or might never have even played the game. But who are we to knock those people? Because without them there wouldn’t be any teams at all.
“It’s a fundamental thing that has to start with — you’re talking way down the line here — the FAI getting involved. These regional centres of excellence now are a brilliant thing, so that has started. All the best players are getting decent coaching at a decent level, but when you’re going back down to Under-8 club level, for example, it’s often a case of throwing a ball in among 20 kids and letting them all chase after it. There’s no structure.”
That approach seems to manifest itself right up to senior international level. Even against so-called weaker nations according to the rankings, the Republic of Ireland are seldom superior in the technical department, with workrate and endeavour usually making up for those deficiencies.
“A lot of that is to do with the culture in England too,” Foley insists. “The game is played at 100 miles an hour over there. This is opening up a big can of worms now but kids are going to England at 15 or 16. If we had proper structures in place, these kids would be much better off going over at 18 or 19.
“I went over at 18 but I know if I had gone at 16 — which I had the chance to do but I stayed to finish school — that I would have been back home within six months. How can a 15 or 16-year-old kid be ready to leave home and land themselves into what is a brutal business in another country? There’s no two ways about it, the minute you pass your sell-by date you’re booted out the door without a ‘thank you’ or a ‘goodbye’. People only see the glitz and the glamour, which is the 1%.
“I know the severity of it and it’s something I always put across to parents. Unless I’m 100% sure that a kid is ready for the experience — mentally, physically and ability-wise — there’s no way I’ll even consider sending a kid over. I’ve seen kids come home and be absolutely ruined from the experience and they might never want to kick a ball again.
“Technically we do fall behind in Ireland because, in many cases, kids might only have one ball in a training session. An Under-10 session here at my local club, they might only have two balls between 20 players. A kid might touch the ball twice in a whole session. Every kid should have their own ball to go through their own technical drills. They should be touching the ball hundreds of times each in a session. How can a kid improve by touching a ball two or three times in a session? That’s bringing it back down to basics.
“The Irish spirit will often get us through and win us matches that we don’t deserve to win, but are we ever going to win one on technical ability? When I was playing with Gent, we would have been classed as the third or fourth best team in Belgium. But you knew when you came up against the likes of Anderlecht and Standard Liege that you had to work harder than them, but also use what ability you had.
“There will always be a tactical element to a game as well, but there’s a lot more emphasis put on technical ability in Belgium than I can ever remember experiencing in Ireland or England.”
Playing in cup finals in Belgium, a Championship play-off with Wolves and making his Premier League debut in a Watford win at Anfield all stand out as some of the more memorable moments from Foley’s career, but the highlight was his — albeit brief — time in an Ireland shirt.
Foley’s senior international career was condensed into a six-month period in 2000, during which he earned six caps and scored twice. After finding the net in a testimonial game for Tony Cascarino and Steve Staunton between a Republic of Ireland XI and Liverpool at Lansdowne Road in May of that year, Foley won his first cap in a 2-1 friendly defeat to Scotland a week later.
He then travelled to America with the Irish squad for the US Cup, playing in all three games — against Mexico, USA and South Africa. As a half-time replacement for Robbie Keane, Foley scored the first as Ireland came from 2-0 down to share the spoils with the Mexicans, before adding another in a 1-1 draw against the hosts.
He didn’t get on the field in either Amsterdam or Lisbon, but Foley kept his place in the squad as Mick McCarthy’s side began their bid to qualify for the 2002 World Cup with valuable away draws against the Netherlands and Portugal in the autumn. In a campaign which ended with qualification for Japan and Korea, Foley made his first — and only — competitive appearance in a 2-0 win over Estonia at Lansdowne Road.
His sixth and final cap came in a November friendly against Finland. Foley sustained a fractured tibia during the game, which sidelined him for six months and subsequently ended his international career: “I was hoping to get back into the squad when I was fully fit but it wasn’t to be. I was probably lucky to get into the squad but unlucky in how I fell out of it.”
After a dismal showing at Euro 2012, Irish fans haven’t had much to shout about at a major international tournament since that 2002 World Cup. When their Euro 2016 campaign begins next Monday against Sweden, Foley will be watching as intently as any of the supporters. He’ll be paying particularly close attention five days later for Ireland’s second Group E game — against Belgium
“On paper Belgium are one of the favourites but I’d have some doubts about them,” Foley says. “We might not have the calibre of player that they do, but if they had some of what we have in terms of spirit, they’d win the tournament without a doubt. But they never really seem to gel together as a team.
“The reason for that, only God knows, but it’s always put down to the differences in opinion between the Flemish side of the country and the French side. There’s a little divide there and it’s sometimes asked if the players from the two regions mix well together.
“But definitely from our point of view it’s going to be a case of batten down the hatches, team spirit above all else and try to nick a goal on the break like we did against Germany.”
As a footballing nation, improving Ireland’s technical ability is a long-term issue that needs to be addressed. If those in a position to influence that share Dominic Foley’s views on how to educate young players, perhaps it’s something that can eventually be achieved.
But should the Irish spirit yield another positive result for Martin O’Neill’s side against Belgium, there’ll be few green-clad complaints heard in Bordeaux on 18 June.
This article was first published on 6 June, 2016
The42 is on Snapchat! Tap the button below on your phone to add!
