10 2GS Saturday July 18 2020 | the times
Sport Football
Greenwood’s rise from Wibsey
6 United forward on scouts’ radar from age six
6 Engineer dad taught him to use both feet
6 Shy but will call out senior players on pitch
move for Greenwood after he had
impressed in Idle’s annual invitational
tournament involving all the youth
teams in the local area.
A scout spoke to Marcus Strudwick,
the Idle chairman, and then asked
Greenwood’s dad if his son would like
to train at United’s development
centre in Halifax, one of 25 such
facilities dotted around the north of
England. The answer was a
resounding yes. United handed
Strudwick a £600 cheque, and the
boy began the journey that would
ultimately lead to him becoming a
first-team star.
“With hindsight, I should have
taken a picture of the cheque,”
Strudwick said. “The money went
towards buying new kit, equipment
and setting up a new team.”
Several aspects of Greenwood’s
game impressed the United scout. His
pace was his most startling attribute.
That runs in the Greenwood genes.
His sister, Ashton, received a sports
scholarship at Manchester
Metropolitan University. Her personal
best over 100m is 12.7sec.
United also liked how Greenwood
could play with both feet. He has his
dad to thank for that attribute.
Andrew, an engineer who goes to
United games if he can get a shift off,is not a pushy parent, but he would
always encourage Greenwood to use
both feet.
“If you’re doing something on your
right foot, make sure you can do it
with your left,” he would say to his
son when they went for a kickabout
in Wibsey Park.
Greenwood’s dad, and his mother
Melanie, tried their best to keep their
son’s feet on the ground, and it
worked. “His family were great with
him,” Newsham said.
It is a character trait that remains
true in Greenwood today. He has
bought a Mercedes, but you will
not find him wearing a bling
watch at Carrington, the United
training centre. He also still lives
with his parents in their home
near Huddersfield.
Greenwood has other talents
too — he won a modelling
competition at the age of four
— but his main passion has
always been football. He
would turn up 20 minutes
early to practise at the
development centre and
kick a ball against a bin
— with his left and
right feet, of course
— while waiting
for his team-
mates.Paul Hirst
Aged seven, Greenwood
would run rings around
boys twice his age at
local park in BradfordFA Cup semi-final, tomorrow, 6pm, live
on BBC One and BBC Radio 5 LiveMan United v Chelsea
Despite his best efforts, Paul
Newsham could barely get a
moment’s peace on Saturday nights
during the winter of 2008. As he
watched television in his West
Yorkshire home, his phone would
buzz again and again.
“That’ll be someone else ringing to
see if Mason is playing tomorrow,” his
wife Julia would say.
More often than not she was right.
“Loads of scouts would ring me up
about him every Saturday,” Newsham
says. “I used to get phone calls from
Huddersfield, Blackburn, Leeds, Man
United... all of them.”
The Mason that Newsham is
referring to is Mason Greenwood, the
Manchester United forward, who will
make his first Wembley appearance
for the club tomorrow in the FA Cup
semi-final against Chelsea.
The fact that Greenwood has
become a revelation, scoring four
goals in his past six matches, has not
come as a surprise to Newsham, who
coached the 18-year-old at his first
club, Idle FC.
Greenwood’s dad, Andrew, knew
another of the coaches at the club,
which bears the name of the village in
which they are based near Bradford,
and made the 15-minute journey from
their home in Wibsey for a training
session on a Tuesday night with the
under-sevens.
Greenwood was short and shy, but
Newsham knew he was talented and
decided to give him his debut the
Sunday after his sixth birthday in an
away match against Silsden Football
and Cricket Club.
He was a year younger than his
team-mates and was nowhere near as
physically robust, but Greenwood did
not disappoint in the seven-a-side
match.
“We won 10-1 and Mason got all ten
goals,” Newsham said.
“Once your team got to ten back in
those days you had to stop the game
because it wasn’t nice for the
opposition, so I kept having to take
him off.
“Every time he came off he stood at
the side of me, looked up and said,
‘Paul, can I go back on the pitch?’ So I
would send him back on and he
would score again. He was tiny but no
one could lay a glove on him. That’s
what made him so special.”
It was not the only match in which
Greenwood would score a hatful.
“There were a lot of matches where
he scored lots of goals,” Jack Burnell,
who played up front alongside
Greenwood during his one season at
Idle, said. “There were quite a few
times where he left us speechless.”
As 2008 drew to a close, Newsham
began fielding more and more calls
from scouts eager to know if
Greenwood was playing that
weekend.
Apperley Bridge Playing Fields is
about half an hour’s drive from where
Greenwood made his debut. The
place is nothing special. It is a
standard, council-run park with two
undulating pitches. The white goal
frames have in part rusted and a
dilapidated changing room is situated
nearby.
The park is significant, however, as
it was here that United made their
During the summer holidays,
aged seven, he would head
with his dad to Wibsey Park
where, with a United shirt on
his back, he would run rings
around boys much older than
him, such as Shaquille Jones.
“He was around seven
years old, and I was 14,
but there were lads who
were 16 and he was
better than them as
well,” Jones, from
Bradford, remembers.
“We tried to foul him
to get the ball back but
he just skipped passed
us. The ball was always
stuck to his feet and his
agility was unreal.”
Greenwood officially
signed for United at the
age of nine. He started
spending some time at
Carrington, where thefirst team train. The emphasis was
always on ball work and enjoying the
game, rather than tactics.
United gave Greenwood a
scholarship, aged 14. He left Appleton
Academy in Wibsey and started
studying at Ashton-on-Mersey, the
school in Sale where United send
their scholars.
Two years later, Greenwood’s
career took off. Under the guidance of
Kieran McKenna, now a first-team
coach at the club, Greenwood topped
the scoring charts in the Under-
Premier League (north) with 16 goals
in 17 matches. The moment that
academy staff were sure Greenwood
was destined for the first team was
when the striker, still 16, won the
player-of-the-tournament award at
the 2018 International Cor
Groenewegen Tournament, an under-
19 event open to teams from across
Europe, which United won.
The international stage did not faze
Greenwood either. Also in 2018, he
scored the best goal of the Limoges
tournament, a four-team under-
competition which England won afterdefeating Holland, France and Russia.
“He scored a variety of goals, tap-ins
but also the more spectacular ones
when he shot from outside the box
with either foot,” Neil Dewsnip, the
former England Under-18 coach who
is now Plymouth Argyle’s director of
football, said.
“He had great power and a very
quick backlift so the goalkeeper is not
able to get set. He was a defender’s
worst nightmare.”
Greenwood made his first
appearance for the senior United
team against Club América in
Phoenix during José Mourinho’s final
pre-season tour in the summer of- It was the appointment of Ole
Gunnar Solskjaer, though, initially as
interim manager in December 2018,
that ensured Greenwood’s star would
rise even higher.
Solskjaer had known about
Greenwood for some time. His son,
Noah, had played alongside him for
the United under-eight side when
Solskjaer managed the reserves.
A couple of days before Solskjaer
replaced Mourinho, Greenwood
Greenwood has been
in prolific goalscoring
form since the restartGreenwood
was one to
watch coming
through the
United ranks