Watmore has been tipped to star for England by his former Altrincham team mate . Picture credit: : Richard Sellers/EMPICS Sport
Following Duncan Watmore’s meteoric rise to the brink of Sunderland stardom, his former Altrincham FC team-mate Oliver Riley speaks to SportsByte about the youngster’s rise, Euro 2016, and the lack of opportunities provided to non-league footballers.
Sam Allardyce may be the mastermind behind Sunderland’s recent upturn in fortunes, but there’s only one name on everyones’ lips on Wearside this winter.
Just a little over three years ago, Duncan Watmore was readying himself for a full Altrincham debut at Eastwood in the Conference North. Fast forward a few winters, and Alty’s former ‘Ginger Messi’ could be handed an eighth Premier League appearance of the season at the Emirates Stadium this Saturday, with whispers afoot of a wildcard inclusion in Roy Hodgson’s Euro 2016 squad next summer.
Mersey Valley midfielder Oliver Riley, 20, played with Watmore during the Sunderland wide-man’s breakthrough 12/13 season at Moss Lane, and while he claims the youngster ‘deserves an international call-up’, it’s a far cry from the tune he was singing when he first laid eyes on the boy who arrived to his first training session looking ‘like he’d been to a concert’.
“I remember when he first turned up,” he smiled. “He was in a pair of scruffy tracksuit bottoms, and he had these absolute terrible trainers on him. I remember some of the lads were looking at him and thinking, ‘he’s going to be terrible’. Honestly he didn’t look like a football player.”
If there were any lingering misconceptions after the first training session, they were soon quashed by the second, with a teenage Watmore tying the Alty defenders in knots with dazzling footwork and evasive movement. The boy might have looked as though he was returning from a Slipknot gig, but it would be The Robins’ faithful who would soon be singing his tune.
“You don’t ever see a player taking players on like that,” Riley continued. “He doesn’t run like the way a normal footballer would. If you watch him play, he’s quite raw. Sometimes it would look like he’s stumbling over the ball, but then he’s just after skinning the player. He’d just get around them as quick as he could.”
A tired cliché that exists in the modern game is that real footballers are born in the lower leagues, which might explain why so many foreign imports are farmed out on loan to the bottom echelons of the football pyramid in order to experience the initiated culture shock. While the top-flight of English football is more often than not filled with professional fouls and cautious referees, in the fifth tier you might find a hungover bricklayer from Guernsey attempt to end your career with six studs to the knee on a Saturday morning.
“He wouldn’t care, he’d just get at anyone,” Riley insisted. “There were a lot of big lads playing at that time, and he was only 17. They used to try and kick lumps out of him all the time but he was that quick, he just wouldn’t let them near him. As soon as we saw him play, we knew that he was something special.”
Unleashed in late 2012, 18-year-old Watmore would have to wait until the following season to come of age as he banged in 14 goals, scooped the club’s Supporters’ Player of the Year Award and attracted some big-league suitors. All while continuing to pursue a degree in economics and business management on the side.
“We played Burton in the FA Cup and there were about 26 scouts coming to watch Duncan,” Riley claimed. “We all knew about it (the interest) but it wasn’t really spoken about much. I always thought he would have stayed because he was that grounded.”
In May 2013, just two months after his 19th birthday, the student was packing his bags for the north east after Sunderland agreed an undisclosed fee with The Robins for his signature. His first season in the Black Cats’ youth set-up would consist of a six-month loan spell at Scottish Premier League side Hibernian, before returning to net 11 goals in 18 games on his way to being named the Barclays Under-21 Premier League Player of the Season.
A promotion to the first team this term has reaped dividends, the 21-year-old finding the back of the net three times and establishing himself as a firm fan’s favourite due to his incisive runs, refreshing flair and raw exuberance.
Watmore is making waves at international level too, albeit for Gareth Southgate’s Under-21 side, netting his first goal and assisting two others during a substitute appearance in a Euro qualifier last month. The very fact that the red-haired flyer was even on the bench irks his former team-mate however, Riley lamenting the perceived ‘snobbery’ that former non-league players experience from the powers-that-be in English football.
“He needs to be starting for the U21s week in, week out,” he said. “To me, it just looks like snobbery. He’s the one playing in the Premier League. It completely baffled me how someone could come on and look so much better than everyone else.
“Apart from (James) Ward-Prowse, I don’t think there was anyone in that team who starts in the Premier League.”
While Watmore is far too driven to let rumours of a senior England call-up distract him, Riley believes that it is his former team-mate’s non-league roots that will ultimately count against him in the long run.
“I think he definitely deserves a chance,” he said. “He’s playing in the Premier League and scoring goals. I think Jamie Vardy will get snubbed for the Euros as well because of where he’s come from. They will play Rooney ahead of him. It would be an absolute joke. You can’t have someone in that amount of form and not play him. But it is a prime example of the snobbery that goes on.”
While Riley is delighted that his former team-mate is excelling on Wearside, he feels that Watmore is one of a few exceptions to the non-league rule, claiming that he has seen many players of a similar standard driven out of the game due to the lack of chances afforded to footballers plying their trade in the lower leagues.
“I’ve seen players very close in ability to Duncan just drop out of the game because they don’t want to sit on the bench for 60 quid a week,” he said.
“It’s just not appealing to them. The scouts should definitely be going down to these non-league clubs. There’s a lot favouritism that goes on within the academies. I think there’s a lot of poor management around because some players aren’t getting a chance. It’s harming the top-flight.”
However, with Leicester City’s man-of-the-moment Vardy setting the example for former non-league footballers, Riley is backing his former team-mate to emulate the former Fleetwood Town star’s goalscoring exploits in the years to come.
“Jamie Vardy’s breaking records, but I think Duncan could probably do stuff like that when he’s older,” he finished.