End of A 5 Year plan

[Phil Thomas]

Phil answered

Angus Ian is I recall 10 months older than Daniel with a January Birthday, hence went into S1 a year earlier than Daniel.

It was ofcourse a 5 year plan you were talking about and you mentioned December 2006. At this time Ian was still in primary. His live grade would have been over 1000 and Daniel's might have been and I think Jonny's was.

Unless ofcourse part of the strategy was to do the 5 year plan in 4 years!

Have to agree though the talent at the younger age groups is fantastic. Also from ages 15 to 25 there are
possibly about 20 players who could/should become titled players. Time will tell and if they do a lot of the credit will go to the players themselves imho.

My error, now corrected at the top of this thread, was to recall that Daniel's P7 year was 2006 and not the actual answer of 2007. I have yet to make the classical mistake (made by a surprising number of fathers) of getting my child's date of birth wrong - I hope so but the combined research ability of the notice board readers might find an exception.

However, with Dec 2007 being 1 year through a five year plan that does not change the points I was trying to get across within that posting.

You are absolutely correct when you say that there are a large number of youngsters in the age group 15 to 25 capable of becoming titled players.

In the middle part of that age range I sent representatives to World U21 in Poland (I recall 2010) but I was unable to get Clement to India in 2011. As you know organising to play in different continent is much harder than a budget flight from a UK airport to the continent.

There could be 20 players capable of getting a title but not all will have the motivation to do the work to get there. IM's on average require something like 10,000 to 12,000 hours of study to become that strong. Even if 3/4 of that work has been done it can be a logical lifestyle decision to concentrate on University/Work/Family and we can't demand titles from all 20 in the next few years.

One way to make future titles more likely is to start using coaches in the top half of the age range you quote. This can be a win win situation but it was always my policy to only use coaches with a track record of succesful junior coaching. A high grade alone is not sufficient. At this point I must state that there are some excellent coaches out there who deserved more coaching opportunities than I gave them. This is akin to the perennial question for large businesses. To concentrate on core activities or to diversify.


Time here to name check the two of those most underused (by me) and most talented coaches. Neil Berry and Graeme Kafka. I hope they have a future role in the development of our elite juniors, preferably in an official capacity.