Think this is the one you were referring to, but it's from The Telegraph.
How Scott McTominay became one of the more unexpected success stories of the Old Trafford talent factory
It was shortly before Christmas when Tony Whelan, who has spent almost 30 years guiding the futures of Manchester United’s aspiring youngsters, bumped into Scott McTominay’s Glaswegian father, Frank, outside Old Trafford as they queued up to get into the ground.
“We had a conversation and I’m there thinking, ‘Wow, all these years later I’m in a queue with his dad, Scott’s in the first team and we’re going to see him play’,” Whelan recalled this week. “It was a nice moment. You don’t really need to exchange words. It appears this lad has come out of nowhere, doesn’t it? But for him it’s been a slog, a long journey.”
McTominay’s emergence at United this term is the latest if one of the more unexpected success stories of the Old Trafford talent factory. Plenty of others who were perceived as better bets have come and gone in the time McTominay has slowly but surely risen to the top of the pile and left behind a scattering of hurdles that might have proven insurmountable for less driven, resilient characters.
He had already made 12 first team appearances, dating back to the end of last season, by the time Jose Mourinho dropped his club record £89 million signing, Paul Pogba, and instead started the 21-year-old at home to Huddersfield Town last month.
It was a move that carried an extra poignancy with the game coming just a few days before the 60th anniversary of the Munich air disaster, a tragedy that decimated a team of burgeoning young stars. But McTominay was no sentimental pawn, no patsy in the Pogba soap opera, his inclusion no fleeting indulgence of a manager paying lip service to the club’s rich traditions of youth development.
Mourinho has never picked anyone whom he did not consider worth it, and as England manager, Gareth Southgate, and his Scottish counterpart, Alex McLeish, now vie for the services of a player who never represented either country at youth level, this late developer is suddenly hot property.
To look at him now, with his strapping 6ft 4in frame, it is easy to assume McTominay has always been big. Even in a team of towering figures, he is among the tallest. Crystal Palace could face a vertiginous midfield compromising McTominay, Pogba and Nemanja Matic at Selhurst Park on Monday evening. But it was not always so. For years, McTominay was one of the smallest players.
“We took Tom Cleverley on a tour to Kenya when he was 15 and he looked about 11 and Scott was similar,” said Whelan, now United’s academy programme advisor after years as the club’s assistant academy manager and head of coaching from Under-9 to Under-16 level.
“Scott was very small but he was always talented and our instincts were telling us we just had to be patient. I think if there was a secret that was it – being patient, waiting for him to get through puberty and all the emotional and physical turmoil that comes with that.”
It was noted early on that Frank McTominay was well over 6ft and there was always a quiet confidence his son would shoot up but, even at 17, he was only around 5ft 7in. But then the growth spurts began and so, in turn, did the problems, physical and mental. Over the next few seasons, McTominay grew nine inches.
“I don’t think I’ve seen a growth spurt like it before, going from where he was,” Whelan said. “It was like, ‘Wow, where did that come from?’ If you look at photographs of him then to now, he’s just unrecognisable.”
The 2014/15 campaign, in particular, was a virtual write-off as McTominay wrestled with Osgood-Schlatter disease, a common cause of knee pain in growing adolescents. The growth spurts were so acute and brought about such physical change in such a relatively short period that, for a while, McTominay was struggling just to run properly as he wrestled with a loss of coordination. "He had a lot to deal with and also a loss of confidence when, at a certain point, he was not able to run properly," Whelan said.
“You’re not smooth, you find training hard. Other players are ahead of you and you’re not sure if you’re going to catch up. He saw players get in the first team before him and wondered, ‘Will it happen to me?’”
What unquestionably helped McTominay cope with a rapidly changing body, and the adjustments he had to make to his game as a consequence, were those early, formative years at United and the trust demonstrated by a wide support staff. He had arrived as a nine-year-old and, despite his size, was championed by his first coach, Eamon Mulvey.
By the time he enrolled among a select group in the club’s schoolboy scholarship programme at 13, McTominay’s technical ability had continued to blossom and he was increasingly adept at evading the attentions of much bigger boys. Leaving the close-knit family home in Lancaster at that age was not easy on anyone, least of all McTominay’s mum, Julie.
“His mum missed him a lot,” Whelan reflected. “We’d say to Scott, ‘Make sure you phone your mum every day’. Little things like that. His mum would come down and spend time with him.”
Although players are now looking up, not down at McTominay, Whelan is convinced all those years when the shoe was on the other foot is a primary reason he looks so technically accomplished for a big man.
“If you’re small, technically you have to be better, you have to be quicker, your awareness of team-mates and positional play has to be better, your understanding and reading of the game have to be better,” Whelan said.
“You have to adapt your game according to your own physical capabilities and Scott did that. Then once he got through his growth spurts he was going to be able to do things other couldn’t and it made adapting again, now he’s bigger, easier. It’s his technical ability that got him through.
“Muhammad Ali used to say that it isn’t the mountains ahead that wear you out, it’s the little pebble in your shoe. Well, Scott had a pebble in his shoe but it didn’t stop him from climbing a mountain.”
www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2018/03/03/scott-mctominay-just-5ft-7in-aged-17-now-manchester-uniteds/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
