Mayo Red
30/11/2005, 8:55 PM
Interview with Simon Webb taken from the Mayo News
With the FAI Cup final on this Sunday, Edwin McGreal spoke to a Mayo native lining out for Drogheda about his eclectic football career.
SIMON Webb. Remember the name? As a flood of Mayo youngsters hover over and back to England for trials thanks to the continued progress of youths football in the county, Simon Webb remains the closest Mayo native to making it in the cut and thrust of top flight football in England.
With the amount of Mayo players being capped increasing every season, Webb (a native of Ballyhaunis) was, for many years, this county’s most capped player until David Joyce from Castlebar overtook him in the last twelve months.
Webb’s caps came at a time where it was nigh on impossible for a west of Ireland native to get spotted. His talents, it can be taken for granted, were out of the ordinary.
The left back is 27 now, and still making a living out of the game as a full-time professional with Drogheda United. The FAI Cup final is on the horizon this Sunday and is occupying his thoughts. But Webb was close, very close, to making it with Spurs a decade ago.
It would be easy to be bitter given how close he came but Webb is reasonably content with life. He knows he could have made it in the Premiership – and had all the trappings that come with it – had injury not constantly conspired to shunt his progress. Now he puts it in perspective. He has spent twelve years making a living from a game he loves. That can’t be bad, can it?
BALLYHAUNIS was where it began. Webb’s father Micheál, a former Mayo Gaelic football goalkeeper, entered a Ballyhaunis team into the Community Games U-11 soccer competition. He had a prodigiously talented group of lads to pick from but there was no doubting that his son was the star. National success would follow, claiming gold in Mosney. For the next three years at local level, Ballyhaunis would regularly rout other teams in the county. The likes of Johnny Burke and Pierce Higgins were Webb’s main side-kicks.
It would be no surprise that Webb was selected for the Mayo U-14 Kennedy Cup side in 1991 even though he was underage the following year. He caught the attention of the scouts there and it was decided that, to keep him in the shop window, a move to a Dublin club would be logical. Stella Maris were the club and, by the time he was sixteen, Webb was packing his bags for north London and White Hart Lane.
Eleven years later and he is much more aware of the system for bringing players across the waters and its pitfalls. At the time, however, Webb was one of the many players who went over to England selected almost willy-nilly, each one of them certain they would make it.
“A lot of scouts would send a lad over to the club he represents just to make sure another club wouldn’t get him, on the off chance he turns out to be the next Damien Duff. It’s cheap for the clubs to throw a lad a couple of hundred pound a week. If he fails, the cost is a drop in the ocean and, if he makes it, then it was a super investment. A lot of kids were victims of that.
“When I arrived at Spurs, on the first day, a guy from the Professional Footballers Association (PFA) came in to talk to us about life as a professional footballer. He told that the statistics say that in five years time only 5% of the 30 of us would still be in the game. We didn’t think that was true but, of that group, only Stephen Clements and Rory Allen really made it so he was right.”
Naturally, the sixteen-year old Webb had designs on a career at Spurs, and the fact that he was kept for four years would indicate that the feeling was reciprocal. However, while he was in north London, injury seemed to be his bedfellow. His excellence at underage level in Mayo appeared to have come at a cost.
“I played Gaelic football and hurling as well in Ballyhaunis and our team won practically everything in all three codes for a period of three or four years. Looking back on it now I should never have played all three. As my career took off, just before I went to England, I paid the price with the back injury I had for a while and the knock-on effects. There was a period at Spurs where I ran into injury after injury,” admitted Webb, whose Youth team won the League in his first year with the club.
When it came to consideration for the first team squad at Tottenham, Simon Webb always found that something would conspire against him. “If there is an injury to a first team player in your left-back position, the club might sign someone or move the right-back across rather than risk a seventeen or eighteen-year old. I think this is where the League of Ireland is improving nowadays. If you are good enough at 17 or 18 to play in the League of Ireland and say, get a hundred games under your belt, you are in a far better position to go across the water.”
The closest he came to making a breakthrough came in his third year but, once again, injury conspired against him. “I was the closest to being fit of all the left-backs at the club ahead of the final league game against Coventry and I had to prove my fitness in a reserve game away at Millwall. I couldn’t, and ended up having to have my knee operated on. You need to have the ability, you need the attitude and you need to have a bit of luck as well. I didn’t have the luck but, maybe, I could have been fit and could have played and been a disaster, you never know.
“One of my friends there at the time was Paul McVeigh who plays for Norwich now. He made his debut in that game against Coventry and actually scored. That’s the fine line between success and failure I suppose, but I’ve been in the game now as a professional coming up to twelve years which is hard to complain about,” he explained, as he comes to the end of his first year of a three-year contract in Drogheda.
Webb was at Spurs at a time when the club was still considered by many to be one of the top five in England. There was, of course, a certain prestige to being on their books but, as Webb notes, that isn’t a lot of use unless you get onto the first team squad.
“I always say to young lads now that while it is all very well being able to say I played for Arsenal or Spurs or Man United, unless you played in the first team, you are there but not playing. You need to make a name for yourself and make a career. That is easier playing first team football for the likes of Doncaster rather than in the Spurs reserves.
“When I went to Leyton Orient, after I left Spurs aged 20, I was making my first team debut in the League and there was an 18 year old in the team who had played 50 games. That’s the difference.”
A YEAR at Orient was followed by a move back home to Bohemians, who were just turning full-time. Five years, two leagues and one FAI Cup would arrive during Webb’s time at Dalymount Park before he decided to look for something fresh last year and moved to Drogheda.
The club’s spending recently is indicative of an ambitious club and an appearance in the FAI Cup final – and subsequent qualification for Europe – is tangible progress. The League of Ireland is certainly on the up with every Premier Division team now professional. Webb is enjoying himself.
“The League has improved greatly. The set-up here in Drogheda is brilliant and every promise that was made to me when I was coming to the club was fulfilled. Drogheda are extremely ambitious and it is an exciting time to be at the club. The town is buzzing too ahead of the final and it would be great for the club to beat Cork, especially as Drogheda have never won the Cup,” explained Webb, who now lives in the Portmarnock while his parents moved to Celbridge from Ballyhaunis some years ago.
Webb has seen both sides of the coin, both going over as a sixteen-year old himself, and watching players leave aged 20 with League of Ireland experience. Kevin Doyle is a recent example of the latter.
“It is a great learning experience going over at sixteen, I hope I’m not coming across as someone who is bitter because I am not at all. It is fantastic in so many ways over there but I do think that if the League of Ireland get their house in order, whereby the clubs can have the correct coaching facilities and qualified coaches, it is a better way to go. That is the way the Scandinavians do it.
“Steffan Iversen came to Spurs aged 21 after playing with Rosenberg in the Champions League, John Carew did the same before moving to Valencia. I hope the League of Ireland can continue to progress in that way and everyone will benefit from it.“
Coming from someone like Simon Webb, it is an opinion you would have to take at face value.
With the FAI Cup final on this Sunday, Edwin McGreal spoke to a Mayo native lining out for Drogheda about his eclectic football career.
SIMON Webb. Remember the name? As a flood of Mayo youngsters hover over and back to England for trials thanks to the continued progress of youths football in the county, Simon Webb remains the closest Mayo native to making it in the cut and thrust of top flight football in England.
With the amount of Mayo players being capped increasing every season, Webb (a native of Ballyhaunis) was, for many years, this county’s most capped player until David Joyce from Castlebar overtook him in the last twelve months.
Webb’s caps came at a time where it was nigh on impossible for a west of Ireland native to get spotted. His talents, it can be taken for granted, were out of the ordinary.
The left back is 27 now, and still making a living out of the game as a full-time professional with Drogheda United. The FAI Cup final is on the horizon this Sunday and is occupying his thoughts. But Webb was close, very close, to making it with Spurs a decade ago.
It would be easy to be bitter given how close he came but Webb is reasonably content with life. He knows he could have made it in the Premiership – and had all the trappings that come with it – had injury not constantly conspired to shunt his progress. Now he puts it in perspective. He has spent twelve years making a living from a game he loves. That can’t be bad, can it?
BALLYHAUNIS was where it began. Webb’s father Micheál, a former Mayo Gaelic football goalkeeper, entered a Ballyhaunis team into the Community Games U-11 soccer competition. He had a prodigiously talented group of lads to pick from but there was no doubting that his son was the star. National success would follow, claiming gold in Mosney. For the next three years at local level, Ballyhaunis would regularly rout other teams in the county. The likes of Johnny Burke and Pierce Higgins were Webb’s main side-kicks.
It would be no surprise that Webb was selected for the Mayo U-14 Kennedy Cup side in 1991 even though he was underage the following year. He caught the attention of the scouts there and it was decided that, to keep him in the shop window, a move to a Dublin club would be logical. Stella Maris were the club and, by the time he was sixteen, Webb was packing his bags for north London and White Hart Lane.
Eleven years later and he is much more aware of the system for bringing players across the waters and its pitfalls. At the time, however, Webb was one of the many players who went over to England selected almost willy-nilly, each one of them certain they would make it.
“A lot of scouts would send a lad over to the club he represents just to make sure another club wouldn’t get him, on the off chance he turns out to be the next Damien Duff. It’s cheap for the clubs to throw a lad a couple of hundred pound a week. If he fails, the cost is a drop in the ocean and, if he makes it, then it was a super investment. A lot of kids were victims of that.
“When I arrived at Spurs, on the first day, a guy from the Professional Footballers Association (PFA) came in to talk to us about life as a professional footballer. He told that the statistics say that in five years time only 5% of the 30 of us would still be in the game. We didn’t think that was true but, of that group, only Stephen Clements and Rory Allen really made it so he was right.”
Naturally, the sixteen-year old Webb had designs on a career at Spurs, and the fact that he was kept for four years would indicate that the feeling was reciprocal. However, while he was in north London, injury seemed to be his bedfellow. His excellence at underage level in Mayo appeared to have come at a cost.
“I played Gaelic football and hurling as well in Ballyhaunis and our team won practically everything in all three codes for a period of three or four years. Looking back on it now I should never have played all three. As my career took off, just before I went to England, I paid the price with the back injury I had for a while and the knock-on effects. There was a period at Spurs where I ran into injury after injury,” admitted Webb, whose Youth team won the League in his first year with the club.
When it came to consideration for the first team squad at Tottenham, Simon Webb always found that something would conspire against him. “If there is an injury to a first team player in your left-back position, the club might sign someone or move the right-back across rather than risk a seventeen or eighteen-year old. I think this is where the League of Ireland is improving nowadays. If you are good enough at 17 or 18 to play in the League of Ireland and say, get a hundred games under your belt, you are in a far better position to go across the water.”
The closest he came to making a breakthrough came in his third year but, once again, injury conspired against him. “I was the closest to being fit of all the left-backs at the club ahead of the final league game against Coventry and I had to prove my fitness in a reserve game away at Millwall. I couldn’t, and ended up having to have my knee operated on. You need to have the ability, you need the attitude and you need to have a bit of luck as well. I didn’t have the luck but, maybe, I could have been fit and could have played and been a disaster, you never know.
“One of my friends there at the time was Paul McVeigh who plays for Norwich now. He made his debut in that game against Coventry and actually scored. That’s the fine line between success and failure I suppose, but I’ve been in the game now as a professional coming up to twelve years which is hard to complain about,” he explained, as he comes to the end of his first year of a three-year contract in Drogheda.
Webb was at Spurs at a time when the club was still considered by many to be one of the top five in England. There was, of course, a certain prestige to being on their books but, as Webb notes, that isn’t a lot of use unless you get onto the first team squad.
“I always say to young lads now that while it is all very well being able to say I played for Arsenal or Spurs or Man United, unless you played in the first team, you are there but not playing. You need to make a name for yourself and make a career. That is easier playing first team football for the likes of Doncaster rather than in the Spurs reserves.
“When I went to Leyton Orient, after I left Spurs aged 20, I was making my first team debut in the League and there was an 18 year old in the team who had played 50 games. That’s the difference.”
A YEAR at Orient was followed by a move back home to Bohemians, who were just turning full-time. Five years, two leagues and one FAI Cup would arrive during Webb’s time at Dalymount Park before he decided to look for something fresh last year and moved to Drogheda.
The club’s spending recently is indicative of an ambitious club and an appearance in the FAI Cup final – and subsequent qualification for Europe – is tangible progress. The League of Ireland is certainly on the up with every Premier Division team now professional. Webb is enjoying himself.
“The League has improved greatly. The set-up here in Drogheda is brilliant and every promise that was made to me when I was coming to the club was fulfilled. Drogheda are extremely ambitious and it is an exciting time to be at the club. The town is buzzing too ahead of the final and it would be great for the club to beat Cork, especially as Drogheda have never won the Cup,” explained Webb, who now lives in the Portmarnock while his parents moved to Celbridge from Ballyhaunis some years ago.
Webb has seen both sides of the coin, both going over as a sixteen-year old himself, and watching players leave aged 20 with League of Ireland experience. Kevin Doyle is a recent example of the latter.
“It is a great learning experience going over at sixteen, I hope I’m not coming across as someone who is bitter because I am not at all. It is fantastic in so many ways over there but I do think that if the League of Ireland get their house in order, whereby the clubs can have the correct coaching facilities and qualified coaches, it is a better way to go. That is the way the Scandinavians do it.
“Steffan Iversen came to Spurs aged 21 after playing with Rosenberg in the Champions League, John Carew did the same before moving to Valencia. I hope the League of Ireland can continue to progress in that way and everyone will benefit from it.“
Coming from someone like Simon Webb, it is an opinion you would have to take at face value.