How James Milner’s Leeds debut perfectly signposted one of the great football careers | OneFootball

“Always at halfway line in front of the family stand.

“My mum and dad had two tickets pretty much level with that, halfway up the family stand, so I could always turn around if we scored and see them.”

James Milner was blessed with a front-row seat during Leeds United‘s rise at the turn of the century.

Coming up through Leeds’ academy, Milner moonlighted as a ballboy on some of the most memorable nights in the club’s century-plus history.

The bust – of course – was around the corner, but booms don’t come much bigger than Lee Bowyer’s last-gasp match-winner against AC Milan. You don’t need a seismologist to tell you LS11 has rarely shaken like it did at that moment.

A pivotal hinge point in the club’s unforgettable run to the Champions League semi-finals, Milner watched on, drenched to the bone, on the touchline.

“It was absolutely bouncing it down at the main stand and Bowyer scored and Dida dropped it through his legs. Last minute, I think it was. The whole place erupted,” he reminisced on Graham Hunter’s The Big Interview podcast.

Anyone who bore witness from Elland Road that night will describe how it got under your skin in the way only football can.

Milner was 14 years old at the time. A “first-class” student at Horsforth School in north-west Leeds, he’d not yet completed his 11 GCSEs.

It was around that time he played for the Yorkshire Schools cricket team and was excelling at cross country – a surprise to nobody who’d later watch him in his pomp – but things were getting serious with football.

He’d been in Leeds’ academy for four years at that point, having been scouted back in primary school, where future Premier League referee Jon Moss served as his PE teacher. As fate would have it, Moss sent Milner off in 2019.

That experience in the youth set-up saw him pit himself against some of the most talented rising stars in the country, including an 11-year-old Wayne Rooney.

“I can’t remember whether he was in midfield or up front because he seemed to be everywhere,” Milner recalled in a 2005 interview with The Independent.

“He bullied people with his strength and beat them with his ability. Everyone knew, even then, that he was going to be a phenomenal player.”

But it was local lad Alan Smith who served as Milner’s major inspiration growing up watching his hometown club.

“He was the local boy who had achieved what all of the lads in the Academy dreamt of doing, coming through into the first team and scoring with his very first touch [as a substitute against Liverpool at Anfield].

“For me to get a chance to play alongside him, and with Mark Viduka and Harry Kewell, was a great learning curve.”

Barely two years after watching Bowyer send Elland Road into orbit, Milner was stepping onto the pitch. Still on a YTS £70-a-week deal, with his dad watching from the away end at Upton Park.

Kewell. Gary Kelly. Ian Harte. Lucas Radebe. Even Bowyer himself. The midfielder was now sharing the stage with the heroes of the Champions League run he’d lived through as a supporter.

Milner’s debut was the definition of getting thrown in at the deep end. Away at relegation-scrapping West Ham. At one point, having scored four, Leeds were cruising to a comfortable away victory.

But the hosts had fought back to make it 4-3 and were pushing for an equaliser when Milner was introduced in the 84th minute. He’d travelled with the first team but never made a matchday squad before.

Bringing on a 16-year-old with zero senior experience to help settle down a fervent seven-goal thriller? The boldest of managerial calls from Terry Venables, but an immense show of faith in Milner’s maturity.

“We’re talking about a dressing room with big characters in it: Mark Viduka, Harry Kewell, Robbie Fowler, David Batty, Gary Kelly, myself,” Michael Duberry recalled of Milner breaking through in interview with The Athletic.

“You can’t be loud or full of it with people like that around you. He was a huge Leeds fan as well and I’m sure that helped to make him respectful but he was that way inclined anyway. His attitude, his personality, was part of his DNA.

“What it all comes down to, though, is what happens on the pitch. From the start, he looked very good technically and more than up to it. So straight away, the lads are thinking, ‘Yeah, we’re having him’. You’ve got no worries.

“That was the thing about him making his debut at 16. It wasn’t like we were sat there saying, ‘Oh God, he’s playing’. It was, ‘Milner, he’ll be fine’. He was a boy with a man’s physique and he was never out of place.”

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With his first touch in professional football, Milner gave the ball away to Paolo Di Canio. But from that point on, he never looked back.

The following month, Milner broke Rooney’s freshly set record to become the youngest goalscorer in Premier League history. Only once in the 23 years since has a younger player (perennial pub quiz answer James Vaughan) scored in the competition.

Still a professional footballer today, now proudly the Premier League’s joint record appearance-maker, it was a fitting way for his career to start.

From learning under the wing of 20th-century icons like Venables, Kevin Keegan, Sir Bobby Robson, Eddie Gray and Graeme Souness to modern-day pioneers including Jurgen Klopp and Roberto De Zerbi, few players can claim to have lived through football history quite like Milner.

He is your living, breathing, hard-running counter-argument to those who suggest players from the Barclays era couldn’t hack it against today’s mechanical mega-pressing sides.

While Milner now ties former Aston Villa and Manchester City team-mate Gareth Barry for total appearances, the 40-year-old is lagging some way behind when it comes to minutes and starts.

Milner is, by a considerable distance, the most substituted-on player in Premier League history. During their time together at Liverpool, Klopp turned to Milner from the bench over a hundred times.

Yet decades before he became a grizzled veteran with bags of experience, Milner could be entrusted to be thrown into the mix and know what to do. From day one, in fact.