This isn’t necessarily about Newcastle’s coaching set-up, however influential it has been in the development of Gilliead. Here at Brunton Park the 19-year-old represents a bullseye hit in the brutally complicated business of talent-spotting.
Scouting and recruitment today is both art and science. Whether to trust the human eye or the cold logic of stats – or a calculated blend of both – is one of the modern game’s great debates.
What is beyond argument is that a club cannot afford to neglect the area at all, whichever way it leans. Drift can soon become chaos, as Carlisle have hopefully now learned.
As Keith Curle benefits from the methodical, database-driven strategy of Lee Dykes, which helped pinpoint Gilliead as a player worth having, United at backroom level look more structured and layered than before.
It cannot be a coincidence that their improvement in performance (so far) came after they filled a deep scouting void. It also defies belief that things had previously been able to slide so far.
The queue of people willing to identify with Graham Kavanagh’s troubles as Carlisle manager may be short, but this was one area where the first-time boss found himself alone on turbulent water.
“After the Coventry game [a 2-1 win in February 2014] we picked up a lot of injuries and I had nobody to turn to for names or advice on players,” Curle’s predecessor said, last summer.
“I was doing it on my own and ringing other managers, so I was very isolated.”
Kavanagh, a rookie at the helm, was living on his instincts and little more. It led to a record turnover of players at Brunton Park, some wild shots in the dark and little cohesion. There were a small few successes, but many failures. Relegation was savage and predictable.
It alarms that this way of working had been passed onto the books at United without any emergency attention. Instead of building a support system, Carlisle allocated what money they had to the increasingly frantic rushes to market.
Before Kavanagh, Greg Abbott’s scouting team had also been a slow victim of the ever-more ominous bottom line. Kavanagh finally got a couple of senior scouts in place at the start of his first pre-season (Les O’Neill and Dave Timms) but a wretched August cost him employment.
So another set of ideas were duly shredded and the club started again. Fortunately in their hiring of Curle they found a manager with allies ready to join him from the off. In Dykes, they were persuaded to invest not just in a person but a plan.
It is not to say that every signing made since then has hit the spot. The very first, Georg Iliev, was a flop, the jury is out on some of those on the fringes now, and while Curle has turfed out some of Kavanagh’s men, he has leant on others (Danny Grainger, Gary Dicker, Antony Sweeney, Troy Archibald-Henville).
Yet the most recent summer still saw for the first time in ages a sense of a staff working to a detailed scheme. Players were brought in with a new way of working deliberately in mind. Such as Tom Miller, Jabo Ibehre and Michael Raynes have been outstanding recruits.
Now there is Gilliead, who shredded Exeter last weekend and was double-marked at Northampton as a result, but still found space to score. His arrival – now on a season-long loan that has not burst the budget – was nothing like a punt, insists Curle.
United’s manager was asked if the teenager’s impact had been a pleasant surprise. “No,” he said. “If I showed you the dossiers we’ve got on Alex, you’d be impressed. He has delivered exactly what it says on the tin.”
Sieving the country’s legions of raw under-21 players is increasingly the toughest and most important challenge for lower-league managers today.
Curle and Dykes work closely, leaving no grey area of accountability. There is no over-staffed “transfer committee”, where every bad decision is an orphan, and thankfully not the kind of egotistical, top-down flow of orders which is currently delivering great success at Swindon Town and Leeds United.
Last year, during Kavanagh’s crisis, I interviewed Michael Calvin, author of the acclaimed scouting book, The Nowhere Men. From a distance he observed an “institutionalised insecurity” at clubs at Carlisle’s level.
“Players are on increasingly shorter contracts. For managers it’s a case of ‘do a job for me today and I’ll sort out tomorrow tomorrow’,” Calvin said. There was sympathy for Kavanagh’s haphazard plight.
In this anxious environment, skewed further by the Elite Player Performance Plan’s assault on smaller clubs’ youth development, the temptation to bond closer with top-flight teams like Newcastle, and hope to grab another Gilliead, is unromantic but forgivable.
Dykes’ recent comments on this sort of arrangement were exaggerated by some outlets, but the broad notion of a “feeder club” must be considered without stigma.
Yet there is not a single template that fits. The Blues have nailed a few myths this season by signing several players from the south of England. Contacts, thoroughness and a certain imagination still go a long way.
In some way or other, they always will. They are principles that need to be enshrined at clubs like Carlisle, not quietly eroded at times when good money is being thrown desperately after bad.
You cannot cheat the system. A re-ordering of priorities in a period of crisis might just have come in the nick of time. It has led directly to Alex Gilliead gracing Brunton Park’s right flank