Nathan Redmond on Southampton starlets, Birmingham bruisers and coming up the hard way

Nathan Redmond is 22 years old but he talks like a man who came of age in a very different era of football. An era of hard men, harsh words and fast learning. That was the Birmingham City which shaped Redmond. His new club, Southampton, is a brilliant academy too. But people do things differently these days.

Redmond runs through the list of team-mates who used to kick him in training to toughen him up. It is a list of the type of old-school British player increasingly lost to the Premier League. “There was Stephen Carr, Paul Robinson, Steven Caldwell, Scott Dann, Roger Johnson, Barry Ferguson and Lee Bowyer. They saw me coming through, a little tricky winger, and they think ‘nah, not having that.’”

When Redmond says “that is how it went down in our day” he does not sound like someone still eligible for England Under-21s, who will surely be part of the squad at the European Championships in Poland next June.

Redmond did not like being kicked but learned that he had to take his medicine. Carr told him that he was as tough an opponent as Redmond would come up against. He had gone through that same learning process, coming through as a teenager at Tottenham in the early 1990s. Richard Beale, the academy coach who Redmond cites as one of his main influences, told him he had to keep going. He had already attracted the interest of Arsenal and Manchester City, but needed to learn the hard way first.

When Redmond made his first-team debut at 16 years old, in August 2010, these men were now in his corner. “When I started playing,” he remembers, “if it happened to me on the pitch, they were the first ones to jump in and protect me.

It was all part of the Birmingham City experience. Redmond describes his boyhood club as a “fantastic environment” for young players. It might not have the best facilities but it does have the most important thing for youngsters, the quality also found at Southampton. “It is the opportunities you get,” Redmond says. “You are never shy of opportunities.”

Terry Westley, Birmingham City academy director before leaving for West Ham, always promised Redmond that he if he worked hard and played well, Westley would ensure he got a chance in the first team. So it proved, and Redmond flourished in his two years in the Championship, playing under first Chris Hughton, then Lee Clark.

Redmond has been the most successful of his generation at Birmingham but he still knows everything about how his former class-mates are doing, boys who were promoted ahead of him when they were in their early teens. He talks about Callum Reilly at Burton Albion, Mitch Hancox at Macclesfield Town and Josh Hawker, who moved to Australia to coach and is now back in Birmingham playing for Highgate United. Redmond takes a keen interest in people around him, and wants to know their stories. That is very clear from the ‘Kick It Out’ session he takes at this primary school in Southampton last week.

It is not just players Redmond’s age that he wants to talk about. There is Jack Butland, Demarai Gray, Jordon Mutch and Omar Bogle, now “smashing it at Grimsby Town”. He talks about the older generation, Sone Aluko and Mat Sadler, who he looked up to as a teenager, and the younger ones, Reece Brown, Viv Solomon-Otabor and Josh Cogley. “If we were all still in the same team,” he smiles, “Birmingham might be in the top end.”

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The comparisons with Saints are obvious. Redmond is now at another club that produces its own talented, well-adjusted youngsters and, crucially, that gives them chances in the first team. Of course Luke Shaw and Adam Lallana have left, but it was not like at Birmingham, where the youngsters had to be sold to keep the club afloat.

The question, then, is whether Redmond has taken what he learnt as a teenager to this new environment? Is he the Stephen Carr of his new home? “I don’t think anyone has that job here,” Redmond says. “No-one purposefully goes to do it. I don’t think the game is the same anymore.”

There are different ways to get messages across. Richard Beale used to tell Redmond at Birmingham that the day he stopped learning would be the day he stopped improving. He has now passed that on to Josh Sims, the 19-year-old who made a brilliant debut against Everton last month. “I told Simsy to ‘keep listening, keep learning, improving and enjoying it.’”

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Redmond knows that he has a balance to strike. The senior players, Fraser Forster, Steven Davis, Ryan Bertrand and Shane Long, all see him as one of their number. He was thought of a senior player at Norwich too. This is his sixth year of senior football, his third in the Premier League, after all. He has played for three clubs, and has scored in a Championship play-off final at Wembley.

But Redmond does not want to be barking orders at academy graduates the same age as him, the generation of James Ward-Prowse, Harrison Reed, Sam McQueen and Matt Targett. “You’re forgetting they are only a year below me,” he points out. “They’re all ‘95s, I’m a ‘94. Prowsey is a ’94, a few months younger than me.” Advice has to be given the right way. “I don’t want to come across like I’m [up] here, and you’re [down] there. That’s one of the key things, the difference between talking down to someone, and doing it in the right way.”

Redmond is already perfectly at home at Saints. They had been trying to sign him for years, first in 2014 when he was still at Norwich. That was when the club were moving from Mauricio Pochettino to Ronald Koeman, and this summer he was signed between the tenures of Koeman and Claude Puel. But this is a club where the philosophy comes before that of any particular coach.

Les Reed [Executive Director of Football] and Ross Wilson [Director of Scouting and Recruitment] had been following Redmond and it was easy for them to sell the club to him. He did not even know Puel was joining when he signed. “Just look at the track record of the players that have come here and left,” he says.

“I wasn’t joining for the manager, I was joining for the club, its ethos, and how it is run. Saints have got a fantastic track record for young players coming through.” So do Birmingham, although that feels like a long time ago now.

Kick It Out’s ‘Next 20’ initiative involves 20 young players from across the Premier League, English Football League (EFL) and Women’s Super League, who represent the organisation as ambassadors and help to spread the key messages of equality and inclusion.