Last updated 09:20, Saturday, 14 June 2008

THERE was once a time – and it seems quite long ago – when football and its attendant hype would pack its bags for a couple of months every year.

Gary Madine: He is a prized young player and an asset who, you hope, can now be nurtured at the appropriate pace

It would allow those of us enthralled by the greatest of games to kick back, empty our heads, let the cricket wash over us for a short while and then come back in August with our love replenished.

Apologies for the nostalgia plunge. Those days are plainly consigned to a distant past; not just at the peaks of the game, where satellite broadcasters are already pumping out brash trailers for next season’s entertainment, but in such foothills as are occupied by the likes of Carlisle United.

You disappear from the scene for a fortnight and naïvely expect the Catherine wheel to have stopped spinning. Then you return to discover that summer no longer has the nerve to intrude on football and all that it peddles. And so it was that the latest piece of significant news to emerge from Brunton Park, concerning the three-year contract signed by the 17-year-old striker Gary Madine, could not be allowed to go unchecked, since it had to be greeted with a genuine mixture of emotions.

The first was delight that a young player of obvious promise had chained himself to the cause for such a substantial spell, amid plausible interest from such towering clubs as Newcastle United. The second, and it arrived with some predictability, was weary depression at the elaborate forecasts which were quickly laid down on Madine now that a professional career is opening out in front of him.

Already from David Eyres, the former Oldham, Preston and Burnley winger, we have heard skyscraping comparisons of Madine with Duncan Ferguson, the former Everton and Newcastle barn-stormer. Eyres represented Madine in the contract negotiations recently concluded, yet he is too distinguished a figure in the game to have his comments dismissed as mere agent-prattle.

“Gary has got just about everything,” said Eyres. “He’s got the size, the scope, the speed, the physical side and the shooting and heading ability . . . I’ve no doubt he’s going to be a big name in the game eventually.”

Which leaves the boy, sadly, with little room for error. Just as there is no longer such a thing as a football-free day, it seems that no young player of genuine potential can make his early steps in the game without trumpets heralding the arrival of a new saviour, a fresh star.

It’s the comparisons that niggle. Descriptions of Madine as the new Duncan Ferguson should be tossed into the nearest waste-paper basket immediately, and here’s why: how many times have you heard such words uttered about aspiring sportsmen, and how rarely do they then reach such artificially-imagined heights?

Andrew Flintoff, who in 2005 so thrillingly shoved his flag into cricket’s summit, made plausible his ‘New Botham’ tag but he is perhaps the exception to an otherwise disheartening rule. In football, the game’s margins are littered with countless ‘New Peles’ and ‘New Maradonas’; either unfulfilled young players who were never allowed to ascend at their own rate, or established performers whose careers did not receive proper and mature recognition, simply because they did not hit the synthetic benchmarks set down so hastily by others.

Into the ‘New Pele’ category over the years have tumbled such as Nii Lamptey, the Ghanaian ‘wonderkid’ whose talent briefly flickered but has long since gone to the breeze.

On another continent, Freddy Adu, the long-heralded American prospect, has recently poked into the senior national team but must go on to reach the highest imaginable altitudes if he is to match the prophesies which have been sounded in his name since he was 14, or younger.

This is not to challenge for a nanosecond the business and footballing sense displayed by United in securing Madine’s services for an extended spell. Reports of the teenager being coveted by several leading clubs are genuine, and this column knows of one attempt to prise away Madine in recent months which has irritated certain of the Brunton Park hierarchy, both for its manner and the personnel involved.

Beyond doubt, he is a prized young player and an asset who, you hope, can now be nurtured at the appropriate pace, without the earsplitting fanfare that would have accompanied any move to the Premier League.

That, however, requires all of us to do just a little backpedalling, even those of us in the media to whom downplaying a bright young thing does not come naturally. Madine’s first senior goal is yet to occur. So is his first exciting sequence of first-team strikes. So is his first drought. So, for another two months of summer, is his 18th birthday. Is it beyond us to turn off hype’s relentless machine until all of those events have passed?

JColman@cngroup.co.uk