Aidy Boothroyd shakes off Hoofroyd taunts to find England vindication | Barney Ronay

There is a good Aidy Boothroyd story in Living On The Volcano, Michael Calvin’s book about the febrile world of Football League management. With half-time approaching Boothroyd takes his Colchester United assistant Joe Dunne to one side. Dunne, Boothroyd explains, should make sure he is not standing near the tactics board during the break. Boothroyd has been thinking about it; he is planning to kick the tactics board across the room as he walks through the door in an explosion of spontaneous rage. He has already put the board in a specific position just for that purpose. “Sure enough, he did,” Dunne says. “It helped him get a point across.”

Boothroyd puts great store in moments of catharsis and inspiration. There was another, more vital one of these at half‑time against Slovakia in Kielce last week, with England’s Under-21s smoking and juddering on the launchpad and in danger of failing to get off the ground at all in this Uefa Championship.

At which point things “got a little bit heated in the dressing room”, in Alfie Mawson’s words, although this time Boothroyd’s role was not as board-kicker or wall-puncher (Boothroyd once broke a hand punching a wall at Northampton Town, something he tells Calvin should be done no more than twice a season to retain its impact).

In Kielce, England’s head coach was instead the voice of calm reason, taking the heat out of the room, and most importantly tweaking his team. Jacob Murphy, a forward with nine league goals for Norwich City last season, came on at right-back and set up the equaliser almost immediately. Fast-forward a week and England’s prized and cosseted juniors, managed by a coach whose last club job ended in the sack with Northampton Town bottom of League Two, are on the verge of a semi‑final against Germany on Tuesday night.

It is also a case of Boothroyd redux. For England’s likable, quackish, maligned head coach this represents a moment of quiet but no doubt keenly felt vindication. England have yet to play any of the major powers at this tournament. They have been convincing for a game and a half, culminating in the impressive 3-0 defeat of an angsty host nation in the final group game. But still, given some of the general spluttering at Boothroyd’s appointment – Hoofroyd The Board‑Kicker, latest embodiment of that old, dark, toxic strain of direct football – a first semi-final since 2009 feels like a significant moment.

“Am I teaching 19-year-old boys to hoof it 70 yards? … For the record, I have never taught an England player to drive the ball into the channels,” Boothroyd found himself drawn into announcing to the world at one press conference not long after his appointment. For some the stain of his early Football League years will remain, when Boothroyd really did aim for the corners, kick for territory and follow the teachings of Charles Hughes’s coaching bible, still, bafflingly, available through the FA until quite recently.

John Beck, stuck forever with the tales of the wild west Cambridge years, also showed up at the FA around the same time. And for all the talk of progress, blueprints, mimesis of whoever happens to be the current world champions, English football does still seem to be looking for its great leap forward, not just a generation of coaches entirely free of the mania of their predecessors, but a functioning style that feels like more than simply a set of buzzwords or a borrowed suit of clothes.

Even now, plenty on the periphery will have been waiting for Boothroyd to fail in Poland, to have the old fault lines exposed, a coach who is nothing if not voracious, with a mania for information, methodology, fresh texts, exposed as just another hairy-back, drawn snarling out of his cave, bundled into a suit and ordered to keep shtum about POMO – positions of maximum opportunity – or second ball or the big diagonal.

At which point there are two things worth pointing out before Germany’s brilliantly fitted and grooved future‑football juggernaut comes looming across the horizon. First, Boothroyd has managed very well at this tournament, dealing with the hand he has been dealt, reacting to weaknesses and strengths. His tweaks have been excellent, not just the shift in the second game, but the introduction of Demarai Gray, with instant, pointed results. The defence has been set up with solidity in mind, to good effect. Nathaniel Chalobah and James Ward‑Prowse in midfield have looked like players who know exactly what is expected of them. There have been some direct football stylings – useful long throws, a blocking defender in front of the keeper at set pieces – but these are just simple, effective tactics well used.

Boothroyd himself has been an agreeable, measured, energetically insightful presence, scurrying about his touchline in his sombre suit, chattering and fossicking, like a friendly water vole on his way to a wedding, and looking above all like a man consumed by the job in entirely the right way.

And this is the second thing about Boothroyd and England. He is essentially what we’ve got: not all of what we’ve got, and not the only way, but a fair representation of a coaching culture that even now seems energetically incoherent, struggling to find its set text, its uniform methodology, a foothold in its own game.

Even the senior England team appear to be surrounded by a rag-bag of cod science and add-ons. Much has been made of the presence of England’s analysis team and technical director in Poland, not to mention Rebecca Symes , a psychologist from a company called Sporting Success, a signal of intent to send a shiver through the rest of Europe if ever there was one. The senior team have been employing the self-styled “world’s No1 individual attacking coach”, a guru-ish freelance Scot called Alan Russell. Boothroyd himself is a disciple of Neuro-linguistic programming, a faux-science of body language and voice timbre dismissed in one academic study as a kind of “psycho shamanism”.

It is easy, and indeed arguably essential, to mock this kind of stuff, but football coaching abhors a vacuum and Boothroyd is an eager, willing product of the system around him. As long as the Premier League continues to function as a rogue neo-liberal state, as long as development is neglected, as long as English football continues to operate without a plan, to maintain its ingrained state of anti-theory, anti-intellectualism, Boothroyd and others will pick up the pieces.