Tournament blog

Pathways

Last week the England blind team met up with their ‘senior’ counterparts at Fabio Capello’s last full training session ahead of their match against Egypt.

For the England blind players the experience was superb. Des Kelly from the Daily Mail helped arrange the meeting and he wrote in his column at the weekend how the players rushed back to upload photo’s that they had taken with the players onto their Facebook pages!

Steven Gerard and colleagues have been working for years through the ranks at junior and amateur clubs, into senior professional football and the pinnacle for them is to represent their country.

For the blind players they have all unsurprisingly had different journeys into the national team but without doubt have not followed the same pathway.

Despite the huge investment from The Football Association, which is first in class across the globe, the structure for impairment specific football is still developing.

The FA initially targeted pan disability football as a way of increasing participation at a grass roots level. This essentially means players with different impairments such as learning disabilities and cerebral palsy playing together. In the last few years together with British Blind Sport and the Playground to Podium initiative a National Blind Football League has been set up and is flourishing, though this still means that talent identification is so important to enable players to have an opportunity to at least get into a league team and from there progress on and up the ladder.

It’s fair to say that the whole infrastructure of blind football is undergoing transition and transformation. Recruitment of trained referees and facilities that are fit for purpose for blind players are just two of the areas.

Also in terms of education there are more newly qualified coaches who have undergone disability awareness training than ever before and the Royal National College in Hereford even have a Football Academy offering learners the opportunity to build football training into their programme of studies and experience blind and partially sighted football at the very highest level.

So the pathways may be different but the chance to wear the three lions is not and hopefully the event will be the catalyst for further investment and development opportunities for disability grass roots football.

Posted by Jon Dutton on 11-03-2010

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