Bright Young Thing: 'They said I was too small, so I asked to stay and play part-time for free.'

Ashley Young, 16 years old and in Year 11 at John Henry Newman, a Roman Catholic secondary school in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, is sitting in the office of a careers adviser.

She asks him what he wants to do. He says he wants to be a footballer. 

She looks sceptical. His face does not crack. Utter conviction. She shuffles a few papers, scans his GCSE results and repeats the question, adding that it might not work out for him in his chosen profession. What is the alternative? The teenager remains adamant. He has a dream and intends to live it.

'I said I didn’t know because I hadn’t thought about it and I hadn’t thought about it because it didn’t matter because I was going to become a footballer,’ Young, 10 years older and a somewhat justified shining light for Manchester United and England, explains. 

‘So she started again, a fourth time, with the question about it not working out. She wasn’t happy. Even less so when I got up and walked out of the room.’

Young’s determination at the time was made all the more remarkable by another meeting that had taken place previously. It was with four coaches attached to Watford’s youth and academy system: Dave Hockaday, David Dodds, John McDermott and Chris Cummins. They sat with Young in a  private room after a youth team match and it was there he discovered he was not to be offered a professional youth training scheme contract. It felt like the end of his world.

'That was the biggest struggle for me. There were other clubs I could have gone to, I think, but Watford had said I would never be good enough to get in the first team and I was determined to prove them wrong.

‘I could have left the game, or looked elsewhere, but I asked to stay on part-time. I did a sports tech course three days a week and played for the youth team, unpaid, to try to make my point. It was then that I realised how hard I needed to work to succeed. Kids ask me about what they should do to make it and I tell them, “Just get your head down and work, work, work”. 

I came back part-time and they put me in with the Under 18s. They told me I had to show my ability against those boys. 

I worked after training every day, I worked on everything I could to improve my game and I never looked back. I started in the Under 18s, within a month I was in the reserves and a year later I was offered a professional contract.’ 

Young, now 26, sits at Manchester United’s Trafford Training Centre in Carrington and shows off the tattoo that dominates the lower half of his right arm. Its central motif is a quotation: ‘In life, if it’s not worth fighting for, it’s not worth having.’

Fast forward and this season finds him a mainstay of Manchester United’s first team following a summer move from Aston Villa, and now as established as any player can reasonably be in Fabio Capello’s England team, where his willingness to exchange central and wide forward positions makes him crucial to a new pattern of play.

source: www.theguardian.co.uk