We've taken a baby step in right direction

No Hunger in Paradise, the journalist Michael Calvin asks Gareth Southgate about life as an academy footballer

- Chris Dunlavy

IN HIS acclaimed book No Hunger in Paradise, the journalist Michael Calvin asks Gareth Southgate about life as an academy footballer.

For once, the England manager isn’t his usual measured self. “It’s a shitty, horrible world,” he tells Calvin.

Southgate’s sentiments are vindicated by myriad tales of broken dreams and shattered lives, most memorably in the case of Kieran Bywater.

A former captain of West Ham’s Under-21s, Bywater was released by the Hammers after ten years in the system.

He received no warning, no support, and sank into a crippling depression. “He was almost a broken soul,” says Pete Lowe of the Players’ Trust, a not-for-profit organisation that acts as a counselling and consultation service for footballers and their families.

Outspoken

“His world had fallen apart inside milliseconds. Overnight, bang, ‘You’re no longer needed, son, you can go now’.”