Football fans who never attend reserve matches are missing one of the game's greatest satisfactions. Nothing quite matches the pleasure of spotting a young player in his formative stage and keeping watch as he rises through the ranks, fulfilling his promise and vindicating your own enthusiasm.
You will not, of course, be alone. Behind every prodigy stands not just a family but a host of those who recognised the gifted child and were in a position to help him realise his talent. Nevertheless you will feel an almost proprietary glow of satisfaction when he makes his first‑team debut and eventually puts on an international shirt.
I felt it recently, despite having no allegiance to the club in question, when the 17-year-old Josh McEachran started a match for Chelsea for the first time since being drafted into Carlo Ancelotti's first-team squad three months ago. It was a Champions League group match against MSK Zilina, and he acquitted himself with the calmness and aplomb I saw him display a year earlier while watching Chelsea's reserves.
That game, a 3-3 draw with Fulham, was held at Brentford's Griffin Park ground. I went along because there was a bit of a belated fuss over Chelsea's controversial recruitment of another teenager, Gaël Kakuta, from Lens two years earlier, and Ancelotti had said that the French youth international would be playing. In the event Kakuta did not appear but the journey was hardly wasted.
McEachran, then a pale, skinny 16-year-old, played off the main striker with a remarkable composure and a left foot, in particular, to die for. He showed similar qualities against Zilina and again a couple of weeks later in Marseille's Stade Vélodrome, in both cases deployed in the role Ancelotti found for Andrea Pirlo with Milan, that of a deep-lying midfield player who intercepts rather than tackles and whose main function is to initiate attacks by distributing the ball quickly, accurately and shrewdly.
"Carlo likes him in that role," Ray Wilkins said when we talked just before Christmas. But Wilkins, himself a former teenage Chelsea playmaker, had seen something else when, in his erstwhile role as assistant manager, he first glimpsed McEachran in an under‑15 tournament a few years ago, while sitting next to Neil Bath, the club's academy director.
"This spindly little kid got on the ball and had a little shimmy and stuck the ball inside the full-back. I turned to Neil and said, 'My God, it's Liam Brady!' I couldn't have paid him a bigger compliment. He's got that range of passing and he can play it early. He doesn't need time on the ball because he's seen the picture before. And he's come on in leaps and bounds. Against Marseille I thought he had a terrific game – particularly for one so young in a wonderful footballing arena."
In both matches McEachran saw a lot of the ball, sending it on its way with a lovely instinct for angles and a touch that subtly injects pace and dictates the initial rhythm of every move. You can't teach that. He also has quick feet in a tight corner and a way of accepting the ball on the half-turn, like Paul Scholes, that makes it harder for him to be dispossessed on the first touch, despite his slight build. And my guess is that he's a Brady – in other words, playing slightly higher up the pitch – rather than a Pirlo.
But as any scout will tell you, usually with a rueful air, there is no knowing how a prodigy will turn out when adolescence is left behind. Joe Cole, for example, seems to have spent most of his career desperately trying to prove that there is more to him than the precious skill he showed as a teenager at West Ham United.
And the last junior player who made a similar impression on me, 10 winters ago, was David Bentley, playing in one of Arsenal's academy sides. That 16-year-old seemed to have everything, too, yet look how over-confidence and bad decisions withered his rich promise.
Something about McEachran's presence on the pitch and on the bench – that air of quiet watchfulness – suggests that this will not be his route through the game.
BBC veers off-balance as Brundle ousts Legard
The news that Martin Brundle will be replacing Jonathan Legard as the BBC's Formula One commentator this season, with David Coulthard apparently poised to slip into Brundle's former role of summariser, is a victory for chatroom agitators and a blow to those who would like to see the corporation maintaining a proper balance between former sportsmen and professional journalists in the commentary box.
Brundle is an excellent analyst, if sometimes a little too inclined to impose a monopoly of wisdom at the expense of genuine dialogue, but it is questionable whether he should ever have been employed by the BBC, given his long-standing commercial relationship with Coulthard and other drivers. And it will be interesting to see whether Reithian values now require the Scot to cut his links with Red Bull, lucratively maintained since he retired from the Formula One cockpit. Conflicts of interest may be a way of life in Bernie Ecclestone's little fiefdom, but that does not mean the BBC has to join in.
For me, the much-discussed issue of a lack of "chemistry" between Legard and Brundle was largely down to a lack of tonal contrast between their respective voices. Not something that was ever a problem with Murray Walker and James Hunt.
Ferguson's sweet revenge?
When Sir Alex Ferguson responded to his son's sacking at Preston North End by attempting to withdraw the three Manchester United players on loan at Deepdale, the first instinct was to imagine he had been spending too much time with his boxed set of Godfather movies and was simply wreaking vengeance on behalf of his family's honour. But when a manager lends out his young players to another club, he is actually loaning them to another manager – one he believes will help their development. The sudden removal of that manager surely entitles him to reconsider his decision, rather than risk entrusting them to unknown hands.
In the busy midwinter
As English football's holiday programme emerged from a blanket of snow, would anyone seriously rather have been a fan in Italy, Spain or France, denied the raucous, bone-jangling, non-stop rollercoaster ride of football over Christmas and new year? Much as it may appeal to international managers, a midwinter break is a joyless thing.
