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James Scowcroft

The former Leicester and Ipswich striker - now a youth coach at Portman Road - on Jamie Vardy and the PFA awards.


I’ve just watched a young Leicester City team at Reading, boys of 18 and 19 who will likely play in the UEFA Youth Champions League next season. They could be playing Barcelona, Real Madrid or any other giant. It’s an incredible prospect, but for now they’re at Reading on a cold February afternoon.

I used to play for Leicester and spoke to one longstanding club official. Lots of the Leicester staff are still there from when I played.

“The club have not been in this position before,” I said.

“Well we have, but just not at this time of season,” he replied. He’s very pleased but also grounded and not getting carried away, yet the progress of Leicester’s first team means the rest of the club could be playing catch up.

The PFA Player of the Year forms are sent out in February and I’ve no doubt that Leicester’s Jamie Vardy will win it this season. It’s odd that the forms have to be returned by the end of February, with a third of the season still to play, especially in this age of instant voting. But come the end of the month, players will be scrambling round their club canteen for pens to fill in their votes for PFA player of the year, the young player and the team of the year made up of players from their own division. The PFA rep, usually the team captain, is responsible for collecting them. He has his work cut out.

I’ve been in the situation many times and seen people put joke entries like making Rochdale’s captain the best player in England and I’ve also seen very good players stay off the lists because they’re not highly regarded as people by their peers.

Players are not allowed to vote for teammates and they’re unlikely to vote for a direct rival. It’s human nature. I was in the running for the Championship team of the year a couple of times and didn’t vote for my direct rivals. Not that it made much difference – I never quite made the teams.

Vardy will be in the Premier League team and also the overall winner. I can’t see anyone coming close to him. He’ll get so many votes from lower league players because he’s given them all hope. He did what they want to do, he made the impossible possible and he deserves the success. He’s getting that at Leicester, but he also deserves to have a party in the great room of London’s Grosvenor Hotel – probably with his teammates Riyad Mahrez and N’Golo Kante and maybe one or two other Leicester players.

I’ve so much respect for Vardy’s work ethic. He runs and runs and he’ll chase a back pass down with no intention of getting ball, yet it will still put pressure on the defender. And, one time in a hundred, he’ll get the ball. He plays off the shoulder of defenders, then beats them for pace. He’s got fine composure in front of goal and you can see that his confidence has snow balled. There’s a phrase in football which you can apply to him:

“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work”.

Of course Vardy has talent, but it’s work ethic which I’d point out – and have pointed out – to young players.

I was involved the FA Cup earlier this season when I was asked to help out at my local club, Bury Town in Suffolk. There was a lad playing who I’ve known years. He’s fast, raw and I told him that Vardy should be his example, that he too could be like Vardy. He looked at me like I had two heads, but I meant it. Vardy’s had the most incredible journey from non-league to this season, when I stood in the Man United end at Leicester and watched him beat Ruud van Nistelrooy’s record for goals scored in consecutive games. That’s Van Nistelrooy of United and Real Madrid and Vardy of Stocksbridge Park Steels and Fleetwood Town. Many of the 3,000 travelling fans around me were applauding him.

The player I’d single out for the young player award had a different route to the top. Dele Alli is 19 but he’s already overtaken the whole Spurs academy by playing first team football for MK Dons. That experience as a young player, when you misplace a pass and get booed in front of thousands rather than hundreds, prepares you far better for first team football than the millions spent by Premier League clubs on their academies. Some decent players come out of the academies, but too many produce players who pass ball sideways but barely affect the game. Alli is far more direct than that.

I saw him play against Norwich recently and he was brilliant. He was so direct and always wanted to progress towards goal and not pass sideways. He kept making runs behind Harry Kane, kept wanting to shoot. He and Vardy are my choice, two young Englishmen standing out in a Premier League increasingly filled with foreign players.