With the form Doak is in, he may be overtaking Clark or even Gordon in the pecking order.
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https://theathletic.com/3680637/2022/10/12/ben-doak-liverpool-celtic-scotland-football
Cheers,
@the count for
http://sixcrazyminutes.com/threads/the-athletic-lfc-related-articles.156776/page-61#post-2176494
[article]“I have been running youth teams for over 20 years, so stories like Ben’s make it all worthwhile,” Evan Fairns says.
He is discussing
Ben Doak, a 16-year-old winger who joined Liverpool from Scottish champions Celtic in July for £600,000.
Doak, who attracted interest from several Premier League clubs, has already
impressed on the right-wing for Liverpool Under-18s, scoring four times and completing three assists in eight games. This explosive start earned him a
first appearance for the under-21 side last weekend.
He has settled in well on Merseyside, even if he is a long way from his hometown of Dalry in Ayrshire, around an hour south west of Glasgow, where his football career first began.
After a brief stint with Kilbirnie, Doak joined up with Fairns’ Dalry side. Born in 2005, Doak was a year younger than most of his team-mates but his talent was there for all to see.
Playing with the older age groups is something he has made a habit out of — last month, he scored less than 10 minutes into his Scotland Under-21s debut in a win over their Northern Ireland counterparts.
“He was like a wee rocket,” Fairns, who coaches Dalry’s under-20s team, where five of Doak’s former team-mates still play, remembers
. “His ability was quite raw but he had this physical presence, that is how he could compete and play up front. He was fearless on the park. It didn’t matter who he was playing against, it could have been a 6ft guy and he wouldn’t have been fazed.
“In training, he was just a sponge. He was very quiet and would always listen. He would turn up to training and even though he was the youngest, there was no carry-on from him — he was there to train and to learn. He was a delight to coach.”
Fairns’ two sons played in the same Dalry side as Doak.
“We had a cracking team,” he reflects. “We played Rangers at Murray Park and even playing against academy players a year older than him, Ben stood out. I remember he scored against Celtic twice when we beat them 2-0. For his second goal, he just broke away and lobbed it over the keeper.”
Raymond Pattison, head scout of then-third tier Ayr United, was one of the first to spot Doak’s emerging talent while on a scouting trip in 2014.
“I went up to Dalry from Kilmarnock to watch them play,” Pattison says. “The first time I saw him I could see there was something special there. He put himself about and scored goals for fun.
“When he joined Ayr, he was exactly the same. He was scoring against everyone and I was like, ‘Wow, we have something special here’. It wasn’t long before Celtic swooped in. I call him the one that got away,” he laughs.
Doak quickly progressed through the ranks at Celtic too.
His rapid rise has not surprised those who watched him play at youth level.
“I remember we went up to the local astroturf pitch for training. Ben was at Celtic at this point and he was there with Dylan Reid, who plays for St Mirren now,” Fairns says. “The two of them were up there running drills for hours.
“Ben always had that dedication, that commitment and desire to make it. That set him apart. He was so single-minded that he was going to make it. On his days off he was up there practising. He wasn’t sitting in his house playing Xbox, he was working on his finishing.”
In January this year, that dedication paid off as Doak made his first-team debut in a 1-0 home win over Dundee United as a 68th-minute substitute. Three days later he made another appearance at Parkhead, coming on for the last seven minutes as Celtic drubbed derby rivals Rangers 3-0.
“When he made his debut for Celtic, his grandad Brian phoned me on the night in tears,” Fairns says. “He was crying, saying thanks for everything you have done. I told him it was all down to Ben.”
Even after appearing for Celtic’s first team twice, once in an Old Firm game, Fairns says Doak remained humble.
“Ben has always come up to see the local junior team. He comes to see us as though he is still just playing for the team. There’s no airs and graces with him. He talks to everybody. He has never been big-headed.”
Doak made plenty of great first impressions among the coaches he has worked with along the way.
Brian McLaughlin, a former winger for Celtic and Ayr and now Scotland Under-17s manager, is among them.
“What I really love about Ben is his ambition in terms of where he wants to go in the game,” McLaughlin says. “It’s OK having ambitions of playing in the Champions League, but you’ve got to train like it. And as soon as I met Ben, I realised that he was a young player who wanted all of the information to improve, he was a young player who was going to work really hard to get better.
“In the first training camp we had and throughout our season, he never changed. He was the same. And that’s what I like about him the most.”
Every time Liverpool Under-19s have played in the UEFA Youth League this season, Fairns says his phone pings with notifications alerting him that Doak is on national TV.
He believes seeing his former charge on screen might soon become the norm:
“He will just take it all in his stride. He’s grounded and that’s how he has always been. He will be a wee local hero every time he comes back home.”[/article]
