When the FFA – and Rob Baan in particular – approach the task of drawing Australia’s disparate development forces together, the Victorian model of youth development may be of interest.

Two men who’ve been pivotal in unifying the state and setting a cutting edge direction are Ian Greener and Ernie Merrick. The pair set up the football program at the Victorian Institute of Sport (VIS) in 1991, working together for the four years.

“Ernie was one of the first players to kick me in this country,” laughs Greener, who came to Melbourne in the 1970s from the UK to play state league football.

The VIS has had great success in bringing on excellent young talent, with Leijer the latest player to move to Europe after signing with Fulham after starring for Merrick’s Melbourne Victory. Earlier, Josh Kennedy, Scott McDonald, Jason Culina, Mark Bresciano, Vince Grella, Ljubo Milicevic and Matt Spiranovic all went through the VIS program. When Melbourne Victory won the Grand Final last February, six VIS graduates were on the pitch at the final whistle.

However, Greener points out what Postecoglou notes: it’s not about how many players you can get into various state and national teams or how many national youth championships you win.

“If you look at the funding,” says Greener, pausing before carefully choosing his words diplomatically, “and how you are going to be measured, it’s the number of players who are going on to bigger and better things. And these have to be measured in some shape or form.

“We [the VIS] are currently playing in an U21 competition for points. And I guess people will look at us and say, ‘How are you tracking?’ and some people will focus on your win/loss ratio but it’s really a matter of how many boys do we help and assist to go to the next level?

“When I was at the FFV, I guess we were judged by how many times we won national championships and national titles. And I’ve got to say in the 10 years I was at the federation I believe we probably only won it twice.

“I never judged our success on winning national championships. It was about how many players came through our system who then went on to perform at the highest level. And if you look at the World Cup in 2006, the midfield of Culina, Bresciano and Grella all came through our system.”

Greener makes a powerful point. That said, seven current VIS scholarship holders have been named in the current Australian U17s squad. Bailey Wright, Kamal Ibrahim, Teddy Yabio, Petar Franjic, Fabio DiLizia, Anthony Bran and James Jeggo (on standby) are all, if history is anything to go by, a good chance to be part of the Socceroos for the 2014 World Cup qualifiers.

“It goes through cycles, so it’s good for us that we have such a good group of players coming through. It doesn’t matter how good your development programs are, if you don’t have that initial quality…” Greener adds. “We just have a very good cluster of players right now who have benefited not only from the program but who have come into it with very good basic skills.”

The fact that Victoria is producing better quality raw materials is no accident. Across the state, Greener has helped to standardise and improve grass roots coaching ideas since he returned in 2003 to the VIS. This in turn has helped raise the level of players coming through to the elite training programs and state teams.

“We are trying to pass the information back to our local coaches. As I said to them recently, our next intake of VIS students is now currently with your junior club. The onus is on you. We can get you doing the right things for them at a young age so when they come into the VIS, players know what is expected and it’s not a culture shock.

Greener put forward a plan some years ago to put newly qualified, top level badge senior coaches on a “P” plate system where for the first year they must contribute a block of time each week to coaching juniors.

“This would benefit our system because you can still coach at senior level but our junior kids can benefit from the good messages coming from these coaches running quality sessions.

“Setting up the academy program was about developing a state-wide program but also really highlighting to the coaches what the philosophy was because you really have got to get quality coaches working in the system and that was a challenge and probably always will be a challenge.

“The better coaches seem to have this view that for them to be recognised, they have to make their way into senior football. But as any world system’s aware, the best coaches need to be working at the youth and junior level because it’s the message they [young players] get from an early age.

“So we’ve tried to set up a career pathway here in Victoria targeting some of the best coaches and really brought them back down from a senior level,” says Greener. “But then you’ve got to keep them happy with financial packages which is always going to be a problem. The best coaches need to be working at the junior level.”

Greener, a former pro with Middlesbrough – he actually lived in the same digs as Aussie Craig Johnston in the mid-’70s – moved on from the VIS to FFV in 1995. Merrick stayed at the VIS and in fact was employed full-time to oversee its football program from that point on, while Greener returned to the VIS three years ago.

By holding such crucial positions – and working together – it has allowed the pair to take a leading role in policy and development of Victoria’s youth systems. “We really needed to create a structure within Victoria, so I guess for around 10 years the idea was to create the development programs and feeder systems into the VIS by setting up programs in both country Victoria and metro Melbourne.”

Unlike the NSW federation, Coerver is not used by Greener in a formal sense. Asked why, he says there is no need to license an entire program off the Dutch company, “as the academy program I wrote for the VIS already has a few Coerver-style activities but isn’t based [entirely] on it.” And like any youth program, the ball and how it’s used is the basis of all training. “We do all of our work with the ball. Our fitness work is done with the ball and the ball is the centre of all our training. We work from day one in every session on valuing the ball. We work on possession and being able to move it around but we have to have direction with possession.

“So, every session we would actually do some form of possession work. It’s possession with direction because we want to hurt the opposition and score goals – because it’s not about keeping the ball for the sake of keeping it. There has to be that balance between keeping the ball but also moving it towards the opponent’s goal. I tend to split up my sessions into six phases; phase two or three is possession training.”

One of the other obvious benefits of the Greener-Merrick Victorian revolution is that youth development in the state has a direct line to the very top.

“With Ernie moving on to Melbourne Victory we’ve got a unique model that I know FFA is looking at,” boasts Greener. “We’ve got VIS, FFV and Melbourne Victory. We are so in line that our boys play with Victory in their pre-season matches and play against Victory in high intensity practice matches. To mark an Archie Thompson or to compete in the middle of the park with a Kevin Muscat is invaluable for their development.

“And the likes of Kevin, Archie and Ljubo take time out to give advice to these youngsters too. And you can’t get that from any coaching manual.”

Ultimately though, players in our youth development system have to want to make it. Postecoglou says, “A lot of these boys, they’ve made it purely through their own guts and determination.”

“It’s easy to pick the players who will make it,” adds Lee, of his former star pupils Kewell, Emerton and Wilkshire. “They wanted to be a good player and were willing to do what they had to do to become a good player.

“Harry trained three times a week, sometimes four, while in school. You’ve got to have supportive parents, which he did. Wilkshire would come up with his parents from Wollongong.

“Plus you’ve got to have the endeavour to get better. Harry got about five bucks a week back then,” Lee says with a giggle at the irony of his former charge’s current financial situation. “He was never worried about the money. Someone said to him, “What if you don’t make it, have you got a plan B?” and he said, ‘I’ll make it.’”

The FFA’s review into youth development is due out this month (September 2007). FFA CEO Ben Buckley tells FourFourTwo that they aren’t going to “operate with a big stick” and tell states what do.

“We should take a step back and realise there really hasn’t been, over the last however many years, a national development plan,” he explains. “We are in the process of meeting with all the state and territory federations to get their input into the creation of a broad, national approach which includes structural reforms at the grass roots level and also some reforms at the elite player pathway level. We need a national vision for the way the game is developed.”

Buckley admits that since the FFA took control of the beleaguered sport in this country three years ago, “governance reform, the A-League and entry into the Asian Football Confederation” has been the primary focus, not youth development.

“We’re not going to take a big stick,” he says when quizzed on how enforceable any review will be. “That’s why we’re consulting the states. Rob Baan, our new national technical director will have a significant input into the content of the programs and from there we’ll seek to work with the state and territory federations to get a national direction. We’ll ultimately have to have a view – but we want their insights.”

Rhetoric aside, Buckley admits it will “probably take a number of years” for the FFA-driven agenda to work its way through the national system. As for existing contracts with third-party parties such as Coerver, Buckley simply says, “you have to work through those individual examples of existing arrangements...”

Buckley adds that a national youth league “has absolute recognition” of its importance to the overall vision of youth development at the elite level. He notes, “There is a big cost attached to it, but we’d be hopeful that we could something [set] up for not this A-League season but the next one.

“It’s not a sprint, it’s a transition phase,” concludes Buckley of the overall challenge. “You can’t change it overnight.”

As David Lee puts the keys into the ignition of his humble mustard-coloured Mazda at end of another day’s training, he winds down his window and tells us, “You know, we have a saying: A 12-year-old superstar can easily become a 16-year-old dropout.”

Let’s hope Lee is not still saying that in another five years.