German club Allemania Aachen now play in the splendidly modern New Tivoli Stadium, but their home between 1928 and 2009 was the original Tivoli Stadium, which still stands as pictured above in August this year.

Alemannia Aachen enjoyed considerable success in the 1960s, shortly after Tivoli’s capacity was increased, Bundesliga runners-up in 1969. However, bankruptcy almost ended the club’s existence in the 1970s, Aachen saved by several big German teams playing friendlies at Tivoli stadium for no charge to raise funds. Most of their existence has seen them in 2. Bundesliga, though they also spent a season in the top flight in 2006-07, a last year of glory for the crumbling old Tivoli stadium. Capacity crowds of 20,000-odd filled the stadium (only around half covered by a roof), and Aachen even ended up in the UEFA Cup in 2005-06 after finishing as runners-up in the German Cup. Those European nights, however, were not played at Tivoli because the stadium did not meet UEFA’s criteria.

Below, a couple of shots from Tivoli’s days in the Bundesliga in 2006.

Photo credit: kleiner hobbit (top) and Bjørn Giesenbauer (bottom two) on Flickr.

This photo of Zentralstadion (Central Stadium) in Leipzig, Germany, was taken in December 2005, a little over a year following the opening of the stadium. It was built within the site of the huge original Zentralstadion, built in the 1950s, one of Europe’s largest venues holding over 100,000 spectators.

The bridge pictured shows how the site fits within the old confines of Zentralstadion; you can see the old wooden bleachers there on the right. The stadium was a venue for the 2006 World Cup.

Technically, this stadium is now known as Red Bull Arena, Red Bull having purchased the naming rights in 2010, along with one of the stadium’s tenants, Vfb Leipzig, now known as RB Leipzig (“Red Bull” cannot be in the name, so again…technically…the club’s name is RasenBall Leipzig).

Photo credit: Tony Quin // blightylad1 on Flickr

Don’t try this at home, kids. Especially the stuff at the 2:10 mark.

H/T: Ultras-tifo.net

1 : the act or an instance of consoling : the state of being consoled : comfort
2 : something that consoles; specifically : a contest held for those who have lost early in a tournament

In private meetings, according to David Maraniss’ biography When Pride Still Mattered, the legendary NFL coach Vince Lombardi called it the “Shit Bowl”, “a losers’ bowl for losers.” He was referring to the now-forgotten National Football League equivalent of this Saturday’s 2010 World Cup Third Place Game between Germany and Uruguay: the Playoff Bowl (official name, the Bert Bell Benefit Bowl), that ran from 1960 to 1969, and whose introduction was probably more inspired by the now-defunct third place game in the NCAA men’s college basketball championship (that ran until 1981) than its FIFA World Cup equivalent.

The playoff bowl originated in 1959 as a vehicle for the National Football League (NFL), then facing fierce competition from the American Football League (AFL) some years before the two merged, to get an extra post-season game on television: before 1959, the winners of the Eastern and Western Conferences in the NFL played for the Championship, and that was that. By pitting the runners-up from each Conference against each other to play for third place on national television the week before the championship game, the league doubled its post-season exposure.

Following the AFL and NFL merger in 1966, a new playoff structure was introduced in 1967. Four teams now advanced to the playoffs. The Playoff Bowl — the Losers’ Bowl — survived a couple more years, but it had lost importance for NFL television exposure due to the expansion of the playoffs. It disappeared into the dustbin of history; the NFL, perhaps with Lombardi’s words ringing in their ears, has struck all the Playoff Bowl games from their official competitive record, now classifying them only as exhibitions. For the record, the Detroit Lions have the most third place finishes in the NFL, winning three Playoff Bowls. Lions as Losers? Pah.

Also often forgotten is that the FA Cup featured a third place game for a short period from 1970 to 1974. The first such game saw Manchester United claim third place over Watford, in front of a crowd of just over 15,000 at Highbury, Brian Kidd scoring twice. The games appear to have been dropped four years later due to a lack of interest.

Louisiana Bulldogs, winners of the Consolation Game at the Bowling Green Tournament, 2008.

Which brings us to Saturday’s game. Is it a Losers’ Bowl, something FIFA should abolish as an anachronism, perhaps pretending it never existed in the first place, as the NFL tries to do with its Shit Bowl? Or is the World Cup Third Place Game, in fact, often the provider of entertaining games and curious moments we should cherish, as Mark at Two Hundred Percent points out:

So the World Cup third-place play-off is the most meaningless match in international football? Holders of tickets for England’s Wembley friendly against Hungary in (count ‘em) five weeks may have a view. There wasn’t a great sense of that meaninglessness when England were in the 1990 version, with Bobby Robson as animated as he ever was when exhorting England to “now go and win it” after David Platt’s late equaliser against Italy. And, more pertinently, Bulgaria’s Hristo Stoichkov wasn’t beating the ground with indifference in 1994’s game when he had to make do with a share of that tournament’s “Golden Boot” (the laces and the insole?) after hitting the post.

So it is that Miroslav Klose, if fit, Diego Forlan, Thomas Mueller and even Luis “the Cat” Suarez can find meaning in this year’s “consolation match.” Certainly nations who appear less regularly in the later stages of international tournaments seem to regard third place as something worth playing for. South Korea and Turkey certainly had a go in 2002, Croatia cared in 1998 – as many bruised and battered Dutch players could testify. Sweden’s third place in 1994 was hugely celebrated – even though they’d been finalists in 1958. Poland took justifiable pride in their third places in 1974 and 1982 (the former making England look good after Poland knocked them out in qualifying). And England themselves in 1990…

I met someone yesterday who told me he was a connoisseur of third place games; preferring them, he said, to the World Cup final (admittedly, he was about to finish a half-pint of whiskey he’d apparently all drank himself). More uncertain narratives, lower stakes, more goals (this is statistically true; check it!), an underdog game you can root for as a curiosity event in itself.

We should also note its distinction from the Playoff Bowl: The World Cup third place playoff match was not invented for television, unlike its NFL counterpart. It was first played in 1934, long before the World Cup was broadcast on television, presumably in a similar spirit as the Bronze Medal game played in Olympic Football Tournaments before 1930, then the most important global soccer competition. In the 1928 Olympic tournament, Italy destroyed Egypt 11-3 in the Bronze Medal game to claim third place. Indeed, the consolation did not stop there: an entire consolation bracket was also played out featuring teams knocked out even earlier in the tournament.

I am unsure — and would like to know why — a third place game was not played at the 1930 World Cup, the only time the World Cup has had a knockout phase that hasn’t included a playoff for third place (the United States were posthumously awarded third place by FIFA due to their overall better record than Yugoslavia at the tournament).

Yet though it wasn’t invented for television, it may indeed survive because of television: as Soccernomics points out, the Third Place Game is popular on television, providing a 4.9% boost for the tournament’s ratings as a whole, “only slightly less than the semifinal effect.” Maybe you don’t know why you watch it; but you do. It might be a Losers’ Bowl, but it’s a winner for FIFA, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

Photo: eagle102.net on Flickr, under a Creative Commons License.

Moses Mabhida Stadium, Durban, ahead of the Spain vs. Germany 2010 World Cup semi-final.

Photo credit: hartleyr on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

La Vanguardia, published in Barcelona, Spain. 8 July 2010.

Wolfsburger Nachrichten, published in Wolfsburg, Germany. 8 July 2010.

Der Tagesspiegel, published in Berlin, Germany. 7 July 2010.

BILD, published in Berlin, Germany. 7 July 2010.

Courtesy newseum.org

These images of certain teams tend to persist far beyond any relation to reality.  ESPN can still keep trying to sell Brazil as samba soccer, but perhaps after this World Cup people will stop buying it, unless it’s all laid at Dunga’s door (Maradona to coach Brazil in Brazil at the 2014 World Cup, anyone?!).

Or the Germans still managing to shock the English in 2010 when they produce a player or two who doesn’t fit into the robotic stereotype, as Gabrielle Marcotti pointed out last week:

It’s not as if, before the wave of recent immigrants were integrated in the team, Germany were a bunch of giant, muscle-bound Robocops (or Stefan Effenbergs, if you prefer). This is the side that produced Pierre Littbarski in the 1980s and Tomas Haessler and Andy Moller in the 1990s. Players who were uber-German and uber-talented, blessed with flair and creativity, as well as sterling technique. Come to think of it, so is Thomas Mueller and he’s as Teutonic as they come.

The fact of the matter is that German football has a long history of producing flair players: it’s just that we tend not to see them as such for the mere fact that they’re… well… German.

Another good example of this was superbly discussed by Raphael Honigstein yesterday, addressing the flood of commentary surrounding the apparently suddenly dull Dutch team, as if total football had been flooding through their veins until this World Cup kicked off. That is, of course, nonsense:

This sense of realism should not be confused with a radical departure or even a betrayal of the grand Dutch tradition. It’s always been there, to greater or lesser extent, over the course of the last 30 years. Mourning the demise of “Total Voetbal” these days makes as much sense as lamenting the switch from black and white to color television or the disappearance of horse carriages from city centers. The Dutch moved on decades ago. Most casual observers have simply been too lazy to notice it.

Honigstein points out that even the Netherlands’ sole major championship winning team at Euro ’88, for all the magnificent skill of van Basten and Gullit, was backed in brutal style by Ronald Koeman, while Jan Wouters in the 90s precursed Mark van Bommel as villainous midfielder pretty nicely.

At the excellent blog Minus the Shooting, the question of “relevant and irrelevant histories” is brought up as we consider narratives about national teams slightly more broadly. Writing ahead of today’s first semi-final, the question of how to fit the prospect of Uruguayan victory into a neat historical context is raised:

Spain finally lifting the trophy is a narrative that already carries a sense of inevitability – it’s a triumph that has already been written, and held back from general release for two years. Now that Brazil have no longer already won the tournament, there’s a case for saying that Spain have already won it. The same narrative can be quickly adapted and refitted for the Dutch – ‘the long wait is finally over’. There is no comparably comfortable frame in which to fit a Uruguayan victory.

So, by the fact we don’t have a neat storyline to fit Uruguay into, they confuse us. As for style: how does Suarez’s handball fit with Forlan’s flair into a soundbite?

Uruguay, indeed, present quite a conundrum from both a common perspective on their style of play and their place in the sport’s pantheon: they have two World Cup victories, but none since 1950. They were once famed for their magnificent teams of the 1920s and 1930s, but who remembers the wizardry of José Leandro Andrade today?

Uruguay have instead in recent decades, especially in the British media, been associated with negative defensive play ever since the 1966 World Cup. Their glorious past did not happen in the television era, so it may as well have never happened at all, as Minus the Shooting continues:

Granted, Uruguay’s glories were a long time ago. But when has that ever been relevant to the expectations placed on football teams? Brazilian players are still being feted for what their team did forty years ago; England are judged (and judge themselves) every four years by the standards of 1966; African teams are still labelled as naive and impetuous based on the performance of Zaire in 1970. German teams and Spanish teams are just about still viewed in the context of their past representatives as villainous mecha-men and talented bottlers respectively, although these two seem to be finally losing their grip this summer. In the group stages, the BBC wheeled out an excruciating montage showing clips of past German triumphs interspersed with footage of pistons and machinery – but even they have since realised that this German team represents something different. These three-time World Cup winners would be fresher faces on the podium than the Spanish or Dutch.

Putting aside the two unfolding exceptions above – and progress on these fronts will be immediately undone if either team reverts back to historical type for even one game – these images seem impervious to the passage of time, and are held to remain true no matter how much contradictory evidence amasses. The fact that Uruguay have underachieved since 1950 doesn’t explain the strange discrepancy about them; they are the only World Cup winners whose achievements have been definitively consigned to the history books, and deemed not relevant to modern analysis. You can never write off the Germans because of their past wins – but I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a pundit say ‘Well, I’ll tell you what… I think Uruguay might be dark horses to win back their title this year. End the sixty years of hurt.’

The obviously ill-fitting narratives surrounding all four countries in the semi-finals perhaps suggests that we ought to work a little harder to dispel them before judging teams: Spain are no longer bottlers (2008 and all that), Germany are no longer teutonic automatons, the Dutch are no longer Brilliant Orange, the Uruguayans are neither their glorious ancient history nor their negative 1960s. But maybe all of them never even were those things, except briefly, in the first place; Spain, after all, first won the European Championship in 1964.

Past results suggest that going through a period of dictatorial government is almost a sine qua non for a nation to be a champion.

Brian at The Run of Play did a very good job crushing that idea.

… [C]orrelation doesn’t imply causation; the fact that two things occurred simultaneously doesn’t prove that one caused the other without a mechanism to demonstrate the cause. Fetter gestures toward such a mechanism—“soccer prowess proved a national morale builder for the dictatorships of the last century”—but while it holds up in some specific cases (Mussolini, et. al.), as a general theory it’s just silly, especially considering that, as Fetter himself points out, most of the World Cup-winning countries that have had dictators since 1930 weren’t actually dictatorships at the time when they lifted the trophy.

The idea memed, nonetheless. (I’m shocked that highbrow soccer dorks — my favourite phrase this World Cup, used by The New Republic’s Goal Post to describe their ideal reader base — appear not to check RoP before coffee.) Laughable, snobbish solipsism — it’s not just for FIFA anymore, kids. The soccer blogosphere has no shortage of writers doing sterling work dissecting the politics of the World Cup and men’s football in thoughtful, moving ways (Occasional Pitch Invasion writer Jennifer Doyle, of From a Left Wing, is just one of them). But who needs all that when the USA’s finest journalists are sitting around a table writing football stories that are the intellectual equivalent of those Hitchens-Amis word games where they mad-libbed book titles with ‘sex’ and ‘prick’?

Last week, the phenomenon’s most high-profile instance was a piece by Roger Cohen in the New York Times called ‘Özil the German‘, an op-ed ostensibly exploring the multiculturalism of Germany, and the shattering of its team’s power structure with the absence of ‘Big Man’ Michael Ballack.

Perhaps it’s not a bad thing that the first African World Cup has seen stars fail where they were not backed by teamwork. Cameroon, with its Big Man Samuel Eto’o of Inter Milan, and Ivory Coast, with Big Man Dider Drogba of Chelsea, are both out. Ghana, meanwhile, has endured through discipline and coordination.

Africa needs more of that kind of spirit.

Ignoring the warning bells that usually ring in my head when the word ‘Africa’ appears in a newspaper that takes ads from the Government of Sudan and has in the past reported extensively on the Congo civil war without once mentioning its international backers, I read on.

Since decolonization began in the second half of the 20th century, it has too often been the continent of “The Big Man.” That was the sobriquet V.S. Naipaul gave in “A Bend in the River” to the African dictator plundering the city of Kisangani in Congo through mercenaires granted license to run amok.

The colonizer’s plundering merely gave way to the Big Man’s impunity in stripping Africa’s assets bare.

Many things about African football became clearer at once to me. Unlike the rest of the world, African football runs on the transitive properties of morality. Losing because of bad tactics and positioning, like Cameroon, conceals the deeper flaw of playing their best player — an inspirational, talented, eloquent man with almost all the qualities of a great leader — at all. How dare manager Paul Le Guen attempt to shoulder the blame for setting Eto’o adrift in a formation where his co-ordination with Webo failed repeatedly and his ability to track back was severely limited by his having to run between left and centre? The blame is Africa’s for producing a player who is celebrated back home as much as he is in white cities like Barcelona and Milan. Memories of the Barnes Theory Of Socialist Righteousness pierce the heart.

As for Cote d’Ivoire, it’s all very well for white people to give a man credit for stopping a civil war in his country. But ask him to play with a broken arm in order to bolster a team in a challenging group and reap the whirlwind, CIV. Given the paucity of Big Men in the rest of the group — no seriously, Kaka? Ronaldo? No civil wars! No Big Manhood! Oh, and Jong Tae-se who? — this was just as indicative of ‘African tragedy’ as any history of dictators in the Congo. Mobutu Sese Seko, your football Nazgul have failed you. Africa won and you lost.

Cohen is merely patting his column into shape at this point. The blissfully oblivious New York Times enjoys supporting the idea that the post-colonial world is self-sufficient and self-determining to such an extent that the origins of the ‘Big Man’ phenomenon in the support of African extremists by their former colonisers doesn’t seem to merit the status of rumour, much less truth, in their pages. Rest easy, readers; coltan wars, oil genocides and repeatedly invalidated democratic elections happen because Africans are just reverting to type. On the other hand, Cohen points out,

[South Africa] has resisted the devastating “Big Man” syndrome. Over the past 16 years, South Africa has had four free elections and four presidents … [a] robust judiciary and free press … [t]he interaction, under the law, of various interest groups … This is its great lesson for a continent where, by 2025, one in four of every person under 24 will live.

From which statement we infer:

1. All African countries have the same history.
2. All African countries have the same set of problems.
3. Big Men are okay with us if they are Big Men by Committee, which is to say that they are Big Men who can be safely invited to speak at G20 gatherings.
4. It’s fine that he brokered the most incredible nation-building negotiation in the last fifty years and possibly ever, but what would really symbolise a betrayal of big man Mandela’s anti-Big Man policies, more than Zuma and the ANC’s drift away from his vision, would be if Siphiwe Tshabalala were a thirty-a-season goalscorer for Manchester United.

At this point Roger Cohen is satisfied with the lesson he has just taught his African readers, and returns to the subject of multicultural Germany and the meaning of Mesut Özil.

A Social Democrat once told me that the country’s ultimate victory over Hitler would lie in the reconstitution of the Jewish community, then being pursued by luring Jews of the former Soviet Union. I always thought that was a vain, slightly kitschy idea.

Parsing issues aside, since vanity and kitschiness are things that Hannah Arendt, the great analyst of European totalitarianism, would have resisted in her political philosophy, this seems sound. Reconciliation and reparation, as Arendt knew, are overwhelmingly difficult, and sometimes even tragic ideas. (Guernica Magazine recently posted a horrifying exploration of how, in the context of some African history, they can simply be another form of torture.) They can be begun by legislation, but history’s best hope is only ever that such acts may go on to form a new chapter. They cannot erase or change the one that has already been made. That is indeed the cause and effect of kitsch and vanity.

But the Germany of Özil and Aogo is such a victory over the Big Man who destroyed Europe.

Which is to say: thank you Turkey and Nigeria for bearing the brunt of the history of European imperialism in your own distinct ways. Directly or indirectly, we dismantled your countries in our world wars, plundered your resources, broke up your nations, sold off the pieces, put your worst enemies in power over you, treated your people like shit when they came to Europe looking for work, and continue to do so. But our football teams are now full of brown kids and black kids. So Hitler lost and you lost, but we all won. So we’re cool, right? We’re cool.

Roger Cohen says:

Africa, take note

Thank you for taking note, New York Times, and other ‘highbrow’ American soccer writers. We know now that you see the currents of history where the rest of us are trying — sometimes for painful reasons of our own — to see football games. But please remember that if other people wore the same smug-coloured glasses as you, your theories would undergo a fundamental shift. Where you see models of correlation/causation between dictators and football victories, others would see the run of play as the rest of the world knows it: of a history of possession dominated by those who wrote the rules, of enforced migrations and unwilling recruitments, of fallouts of totalitarianism where there is no such thing as an ‘almost sine qua non‘; of contests that we must always resist seeing as wars, because they can only ever be only fought — and won — on the field.

One should be wary of generalising too much from a sample of five games, but Germany’s tremendously successful World Cup so far and the quality of its young players, with its youngest-ever team at the tournament averaging out at 24.7 years-old, has sparked plenty of understandable interest in its youth development system.

That system seems to be the product of far-sighted planning based on disappointment with the quality of players the country was producing at the turn of the millennium, coupled with the priorities of the elite professional structure reflecting a recognition of the benefit of development for the national team along with a strong economic incentive to prioritise young domestic talent.

We can draw these conclusions from two articles in the past few days, by Jamie Jackson today in the Observer and by long-time translator of the German game for an English-language audience, Raphael Honigstein at Sports Illustrated.

Between them, we get a picture of German soccer at a crossroads in the late 1990s. The World Cup winning team of 1990 and the fruits of reunification produced surprisingly diminishing returns as the decade wore on: disappointment at USA ’94 was followed by success at Euro’96 in England and a quarter-final exit at the ’98 World Cup. A very rare group stage exit at the 2000 European Championships was the final spark for a rethink on the structure of youth development, as the proportion of foreigners had risen massively in the Bundesliga during the 1990s, Honigstein tells us:

Below the radar. . .something strange and disconcerting was happening: Germany was running out of decent players. The influx from GDR-trained professionals that was supposed to make “Germany unbeatable for years to come” (according to Franz Beckenbauer after winning the World Cup in 1990) had dried up along with the funding for the specialized sports schools where they had been drilled from a very young age. In the Bundesliga, newly rich clubs awash with TV money had gone on a spending spree, doubling the number of foreigners from 17 percent (1992) to 34 percent (1997) in five years.

Desperate for strikers in particular, national manager Vogts ensured that South-African born Sean Dundee, a Karlsruher FC player without any German background, was fast-tracked for German citizenship. Dundee received his passport in January 1997 but never played for Germany after picking up an injury before his first scheduled game, a friendly against Israel, and losing his form soon after.

Vogts’ successor, Erich Ribbeck, equally desperate, approached another Bundesliga import, Brazilian forward Paulo Rink (Leverkusen). Rink, it turned out, had German grandparents and was quickly introduced to the national team. He picked up 13 caps from 1998 to 2000.

The cases of Rink and Dundee, both unprecedented in German football since the war, demonstrated that something was very wrong. The disappointing quarterfinal exit against Croatia at the 1998 World Cup then made it plain to see: not enough talent was coming through. In the Bundesliga, the percentage of foreigners had risen again, to 50 percent by the time the season kicked off in 2000.

At this point, Honigstein explains, a new structure in Germany’s youth development system was implemented, with 121 national talent centers built for 10-17 year-olds, emphasising technical skills, with full-time coaches at a cost of $15.6 million over five years. Meanwhile, all professional clubs in Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 were required to build youth academies by the German Football Association.

Jackson explains the consequences, quoting Christian Seifert, the Bundesliga’s CEO:

Seifert said that the national team’s stark improvement was a direct result of the overhaul of Germany’s academy system, with all 36 clubs in the two Bundesliga divisions now obliged to operate centrally regulated academies before being given a licence to play in the league. Of the 23-man national squad now in South Africa, 19 came from Bundesliga academies, with the other four from Bundesliga 2 academies.

The most significant change, said Seifert, was insisting that in these new academies at least 12 players in each intake have to be eligible to play for Germany.

“That was the key difference,” he said. “Fifa’s 6+5 rule means only that players must have grown up in the club. For example, Cesc Fabregas was developed at Arsenal, but is Spanish. In Germany, our academies must have 12 in each group able to play for Germany.”

Since that restructuring, the proportion of Germany-qualified players in the Bundesliga has changed significantly.

“In 2003-4 we had 44% from foreign countries,” Seifert said. “Right now it is only 38%. So 62% are able to play for the national team.” In England it is the other way around, with an approximate 60/40 split of foreigners and nationals.

Interestingly, one key cornerstone of German professional soccer and one key economic development provided the underpinnings for this system to be successfully implemented.

Firstly, as Honigstein puts it, economic necessity forced a focus on cheaper domestic talent:

The Kirch TV conglomerate that had bankrolled the Bundesliga boom since the early ’90s collapsed in 2002, leaving the clubs in severe financial difficulties. Faced with huge, unsustainable wage bills, they found that the easiest way to cope was to release all the well-paid but fairly mediocre foreigners on their books and replace them with young, much cheaper recruits from their own youth teams.

Secondly, unlike in England, a unified approach and the requirement that clubs are majority owned by local supporters made it easier to put in place a focus on domestic youth development, according to Jackson:

“In 2003-4 we had 44% from foreign countries,” Seifert said. “Right now it is only 38%. So 62% are able to play for the national team.” In England it is the other way around, with an approximate 60/40 split of foreigners and nationals.

Seifert emphasised that essential to the system’s smooth operation was the unity between clubs and the German FA, achieved in part through the stipulation that no single entity can own more than 49% of a Bundesliga club.

“This way you don’t have a foreign owner who doesn’t really care for the national teams,” said Seifert. “The clubs have a very strong relationship with the FA: we are all engaged in discussions [about youth development].”

That is in stark contrast to England, where infighting between the FA, the Premier League and the Football League resulted in the Professional Game Youth Development Group being disbanded last year after just a year of operation. Since then, no single body has been in control of youth development in England. Instead, the power has rested with Premier League clubs.

Germany’s system emphasises development in elite centres from a slightly older age, and focuses on small-sided skills at younger ages. Via Honigstein: “We start with the U-9s. They play four-a-side, on small pitches, to encourage individual skills,” said Thomas Albeck, head of youth development at Stuttgart. “We then add players every year, only the U-13s are playing with full teams.”

There are many lessons here to consider for countries around the world struggling with trying to work out the best way to develop young domestic talent.