The England Football Team Thread

[TF S4DK]

Cos he believes it maybe...

"All you do is throw the ball"

[TF S4DK]

PREMIER LEAGUE clubs have been accused of undermining England’s future as a row threatens to erupt over the European Under-19 Championship.

England’s World Cup elimination has seen the focus thrown on the country’s young emerging talent, but the refusal of top-flight sides to release their players is set to prompt a storm.

The Under-19 tournament starts in France next week and coach Noel Blake wants to include Blackburn’s Phil Jones, Aston Villa’s Nathan Delfouneso and possibly a quartet of youngsters from Tottenham in his final squad, which is announced this week.

Club England chairman Sir Dave Richards wrote to all top-flight teams asking them to prioritise the release of players before the official start to the new season.

But Blackburn want Jones, who made the breakthrough into the first team last season, to go on their pre-season tours to Austria and Australia.

And Spurs have written to the FA saying it does not make sense for their players – Steven Caulker, Andros Townsend, Ryan Mason and Dean Parrett – to be released because the championship comes too early in the pre-season programme. Arsenal – whose young top Gunner is Tom Cruise – Manchester United, Chelsea, Fulham, West Ham, Newcastle and Sunderland are the other Premier League sides being asked to release players.

Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA’s director of football development, and Blake, now fear England’s hopes will be sabotaged by the Premier League clubs’ selfish outlook. “We have a European Championship which will be a fantastic experience,” Brooking said.

“The Premier and Football League clubs said they would support us and clubs would release players.

“But we have five lads we might have issues with. They will never ever get that tournament experience against quality opposition otherwise. Phil Jones, the Blackburn lad, a first-team player, who is outstanding, will be a key man if we are going to do any good in that tournament.

“We also need Nathan Delfouneso, another key player and we want him released by Aston Villa.”

England meet up on July 12 and travel to Normandy three days later for games against Austria, Holland and hosts France.

Spain, Portugal, Italy and Croatia are in the other group. “With all the other countries, there won’t even be an issue. Their players will be released,” said Brooking, who believes the new National Football Centre in Burton is the key to England’s rejuvenation as a major football power.

Having played a key role in confirming Fabio Capello will see out the remainder of his contract, Brooking is turning his attentions back to his day job as the FA’s director of youth development.

“I am acutely aware that there are no quick fixes and no easy answers,” said Brooking.

“But I am convinced that the key to securing this future is that we must have more and better coaches with access to more kids at an earlier age.

[MrJibbles]

This is what I said a few pages back, these kids NEED to be playing in these tournaments.

[The King]

These kids NEED to be playing in these tournaments.

[Agony]

GARY NEVILLE reckons England are stuck with their World Cup flops for another two years.

Many fans want Fabio Capello to clear out his under-achievers after their humbling by Germany and give youth a chance in the Euro 2012 qualifiers.

But Manchester United defender Neville, who won 85 England caps, says there are simply not enough good youngsters to fill the gaps.

He said: "There is talk about Capello blooding youngsters ahead of Euro 2012, but there is no magic wand.

"OK, David James is 39, but Ashley Cole, Glen Johnson, John Terry, Rio Ferdinand, Ledley King, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Joe Cole, James Milner, Michael Carrick and Gareth Barry will still play. You can't just conjure up 11 brilliant new England players.

"There are perhaps one or two young players that could force their way into the next squad.

"But there is no factory that will suddenly produce a group no one has ever heard of. The reality is, most players in the first 11 at the World Cup will play in England's next friendly in August."

Neville, 35, also claimed the FA were right to stick with Capello despite a poor World Cup. He said: "Whatever happens over the next two years of his contract he will go down as one of the most successful managers in football.

"So to suggest that he doesn't have a winning mentality or can't win major trophies is wrong.

"England have a man in charge who is one of the very best.

"For me, sacking him was never an option. We would have just perpetuated the cycle of changing managers and tactics all over again."

Neville knew England were at risk of a knockout the moment they failed to beat Algeria in the second group game. He added: "If you look at the quality of Argentina, Brazil, Holland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Uruguay and Chile, you'd have to think long and hard about whether England are better than any of them.

"Maybe we expect too much, although there is no doubt England are better than they showed in this World Cup.

"The real failure was in the group stage - not finishing top cost England because we ended up playing Germany, not Ghana."

[Agony]

Forget the kidology... England must start producing total footballers

Last updated at 1:01 AM on 5th July 2010

You win nothing with kids, said Alan Hansen, and nobody has let him forget it. If Germany progress beyond Spain at this World Cup, expect him to be mockingly reminded of that famous quote again.

The irony is Hansen wasn’t wrong. Germany arrived at the tournament with the youngest squad beyond Ghana and North Korea and, now established as the form team, it is understandable that great attention is being paid to the freshness of players such as Mesut Ozil and Thomas Muller.

There is a lesson here for all, we are told, and particularly England. Yet a stellar youth team is often a triumph of happenstance.

Manchester United have not changed procedure substantially in the last 20 years, but have never produced a group of players as strong as David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Gary Neville, Phil Neville and Nicky Butt. The odd one or two come through, but never five at once.

For all we know, this may be Germany’s moment now. Their system works, obviously, but the quality of the raw material could be the bounty of a single point in time.

In England, we have no ideas of our own, so we steal like magpies from other nests.

When the Italian league was strongest, we went on a diet of grilled meat and pasta, then France were world champions and we had to have our own Clairefontaine.

Spain won the European Championship in 2008 and Argentina’s Lionel Messi assumed the title of the best player in the world, so the Barcelona academy and Mighty Atom midfield players became our holy grail.

Now Germany are in the ascendancy, so Vorsprung durch Technik, as we will no doubt be chanting at our academies this morning as we wait in line for bad haircuts.

The real lesson for English football, though, comes from Germany’s older generation, players such as Bastian Schweinsteiger, Philipp Lahm and Arne Friedrich.

For just as it is a myth that United defied Hansen’s derogatory comments about over-reliance on youth in 1995 — their team had plenty of experience from Peter Schmeichel, through Denis Irwin, Steve Bruce and Gary Pallister to Eric Cantona — so there is a core of maturity at work in this Germany team, and an approach to the game that exposes English limitations.

Schweinsteiger, the best player on the field against Argentina on Saturday, has operated for most of his career as a left-sided player, who can be switched to the right.

When Joachim Low, the Germany coach, changed the way his side played, Schweinsteiger was dropped from the left forward role in favour of Lukas Podolski. 

Always a combative sort, he returned having been reinvented as a creative holding midfield player, more in the mould of Xabi Alonso than Javier Mascherano.

Friedrich made his name for Germany as a right wing back at the Confederations Cup in 2005 and played at full back until 2009 when he was converted to a role in central defence. He has also occupied the holding position in midfield.

Then there is Lahm, who switches between left and right, like football’s equivalent of the Hokey Cokey. He is right-footed and prefers that position, but is equally at home on the left and at one tournament started on one flank and then switched because Marcell Jansen was struggling at left back.

So forget youth for a moment and answer this: where are the English players with equivalent versatility?

Where is our left back who can go right, our full back who can play centre half, our winger who can hold? Where, for heaven’s sake, is our full back who can make a simple transition to wing back? It certainly wasn’t Ashley Cole, when Steve McClaren tried this against Croatia in 2006.

Moved a few yards from their comfort zones, the English tendency is to act up. Will we ever hear the last of all the positions Steven Gerrard cannot play, that Gareth Barry is not a holding player, or Wayne Rooney no longer wishes to be considered a No 10?

It is not just that England play in straight lines; we think in straight lines, too. We do not produce footballers, but right midfielders, left backs and strikers.

And we let our international players off the hook if we put German advancement at this World Cup down to youth alone, and ignore the way the experienced members of Low’s team have taken responsibility and demonstrated their intelligence.

It is their professional attitudes that have allowed the youngest players in the team to thrive. We can talk about introducing Adam Johnson or Jack Rodwell to the England squad, but what chance will they have among players so introspective that an alteration measured in yards provokes a crisis of confidence?

When Ashley Cole was injured for much of the 2005-06 season, Arsene Wenger put a defensive midfield player, Mathieu Flamini, in at left back during a run to the Champions League final.

Flamini started in that position, home and away, against Real Madrid, Juventus and Villarreal during which time Arsenal did not concede a goal. He was shaky, at first, in the Bernabeu but swiftly recovered to shut David Beckham out of the game. Asked when he had last played left back, Flamini thought he might have had a game or two there at school.

Now, imagine if, in a similar emergency, Cole had been required to fill in for Flamini in central midfield. Unthinkable, isn’t it? Yet even when the early exchanges with Madrid suggested Flamini could be in trouble given an unfamiliar task, he did not panic or hide. He had every excuse for a poor game, but he chose instead to knuckle down and have a good one.

Fast forward to England’s World Cup and being played out of position is increasingly advanced as the reason behind the malaise affecting Rooney and Gerrard. Neither wanted to occupy the role they had played in the qualifiers; Gerrard starting left and joining the forward line, Rooney starting second striker and becoming the spearhead.

We are talking nuances here, though, mere tinkering. Yet England’s coach is not even allowed to tinker because his players get the vapours if he moves them 10 yards square.

A subtle switch of the type made by Friedrich or Lahm is considered daring and a transformation such as the one undergone by Schweinsteiger unimaginable.

Fabio Capello might as well try to place an English player on the moon as ask him to adapt. It is not Germany’s kids that are our problem, but England’s arrested adolescents.

Football Association opts to carry on cheating

So, after four days of high-level consultations — one imagines it was like one of those sketches with no punch line in Spike Milligan’s Q series, with the cast walking slowly towards the camera intoning ‘what are we going to do now, what are we going to do now?’ — the Football Association have come up with their grand plan for the future of English football. We’re going with two more years of cheating.

Not literal cheating, of course, as no FIFA rule forbids employing a foreign coach; but cheating in spirit because international football is supposed to be the best of theirs against the best of yours, and if your coaching system is so inadequate it cannot produce one manager of substance, there should be a price to pay.

England do not deserve to succeed at international level because the system is dysfunctional, but the FA will try once more to circumvent institutional failings with wealth.

FIFA should ban any nation ranked in the top 50 when World Cup qualifying begins from coming to this cosy arrangement.

The irony is that people who see nothing wrong with the continued employment of Fabio Capello are horrified at the thought of, for instance, Mikel Arteta of Everton being asked to play for England.

Why? Arteta is not English, yet neither is the manager. And Capello, with four Italian assistants, using Italian training methods and Italian team structure, is going to have considerably more influence over the Englishness of the national team than a single Spanish footballer, who has played in the Premier League since January 2005 (and was also two years in Scotland with Rangers).

We highlight the number of foreign players in English football, but the lack of faith in English managers is an equal problem.

Take Liverpool. In 2004, with the club underperforming but still able to qualify for the Champions League, Rafael Benitez of Valencia was offered the chance to be manager. Now, having finished seventh, out of the Champions League and only in the Europa League because Portsmouth are a financial basket case, the club have slipped sufficiently to offer their job to an Englishman, Roy Hodgson.

Roman Abramovich, the Chelsea owner, has never employed an English manager. He is probably waiting for the day Chelsea slump to mid-table before pressing that little emergency button.

The horrible paucity of qualified youth coaches is acknowledged. Sir Trevor Brooking, who directs football at the FA but never seems to be held responsible for its systematic failure, is encouraging more people to take the Grade 1 FA coaching badge, but this is a joke qualification.

My boys used to play at a club with a swamp for a pitch and, as the ball headed off for a certain throw-in, we got used to a well-meaning cry from the touchline.

‘No lost causes,’ one of the dads would shout to a nine-year-old, who had decided not to indulge futility further by chasing through knee-deep mud in the fruitless avoidance of a throw-in. The man giving this aimless encouragement was a Grade 1 coach.

He had a glorified child-minding certificate, really. The serious qualification is the Grade A UEFA license, at which level Spain have 750 qualified and England 150. Of those, 640 of the Spanish Grade A licensed coaches work with children and youth players, compared to none in England.

Don’t worry, though, we’re paying  a guy £12million over the next two years to pretend this does not matter. Wouldn’t it be funny if he picked Arteta, just to rub it in? Wouldn’t that throw a delightful little curveball to the FA’s moral relativists?

AND WHILE WE'RE AT IT...

It would now appear that we will not be treated to the second enthralling chapter of Wayne Rooney’s life story, due to be published in the event of England having a decent World Cup, so maybe never.

Not to worry. On the evidence of volume one, there was as much chance of him adequately explaining perturbation theory as applied to quantum mechanics as there was of him revealing where his head was at in South Africa.

England need the Samaritans not a sports psychologist

Possibly the most incongruous sight of England’s failed World Cup campaign was Christian Lattanzio, a sports psychologist, sitting next to Fabio Capello to help with difficult translations during the inquests that followed defeat by Germany.

During the winter, Lattanzio had been employed to get into the heads of Gianfranco Zola’s players at West Ham.

On a roll, isn’t he? Wouldn’t it be cheaper just to hand out the number of the Samaritans?

Want some conflict? Appoint Curbishley

Of all the managers who could succeed Roy Hodgson at Fulham, how has Alan Curbishley ended up as the favourite?

Nothing against Curbishley, nothing against any English coach getting a good job in the Premier League, but one look at Fulham’s squad would suggest employing him spells trouble.

Danny Murphy, the Fulham captain, fell out spectacularly with Curbishley at Charlton, his move to Tottenham degenerating into a slanging match after Curbishley accused him of desiring a bigger club ‘so that his social diary can be fuller and he can go to more film premieres’.

Similar animosity defined Curbishley’s relationship with the Fulham full back Paul Konchesky, who said he was ‘bitter and twisted’ when they worked together at West Ham.

While Curbishley was there, he also sold Bobby Zamora, the Fulham striker, and defender John Pantsil.

Hodgson did outstanding work at Craven Cottage and losing him is bound to have an impact.

Why compound this by appointing the one man whose first task will be to repair his relationship with close to half of the first team? That really is taking the hard road.

[Lenny]

Good read Agony

[TF S4DK]

England hasn't got the patience to groom total footballers. The media backlash is too strong. The players/their entourage are too strong. The bitching fans that just bitch about everything are too strong. Once the competition of the Premier league restarts this will all get forgotten.

Take Theo Walcott for example. Like him or hate him, at this current point he is England 's best product under 21 right now. In the Arsenal first-team, has Champions League experience and capped at senior level with senior goals to his name.

Now its pretty obvious Theo ain't a outspoken player, but if he was, he due to people around him would probably be demanding to play upfront via comments to the press.

When he got cut from the World Cup squad, I heard all the Talksport lot complain that Wenger was "messing him up", "Walcott needs to leave Arsenal", "Wenger can't work with English players", "Just play him thru the middle, use his pace", etc...

Now I hear the same people saying we need to produce total footballers, comfortable in various positions and on the ball... Erm isn't that what Wenger is trying to do with Walcott, a guy who self-admits he didnt kick ball in a playground till like 12, which is a age where in most foreign countries thay would say its too late for you now for the top top top level...

[MrJibbles]

Have to C/S what you said Ice, esp on the "Being too small" and racism issue, that's one big problem in this country with football. They love picking players who are stocky etc and some even pick players just based on their home life.

[TF S4DK]

Football has always been a bit old boys club. I do think things are getting better but people from certain backgrounds do need to do more than just wait on their school. If you live in London, tbh with Arsenal about, that argument has no legs.

[Mr. Gayle]

Kids shouldnt be allowed to play with a full sized football till they are in teens, should be on small pitches

Learn proper technique

[Black Ant]

Football has always been a bit old boys club. I do think things are getting better but people from certain backgrounds do need to do more than just wait on their school. If you live in London, tbh with Arsenal about, that argument has no legs.

certain backgrounds?

[TF S4DK]

Well I dont know of no old black or asian boys clubs, do you?

[Black Ant]

SOOOORRRRRRYYY

i was just tryna understand what you were saying

im slow

gosh

[Reuben]

was it in that hoddle article where he says about certain kids being able to use there pace or skill to dribble or run past like 5 man and get into a goal scoring opportunity in youth football then finding that doesnt work at senior level and having no plan B to fall back on..... not playing with there head up.

sometimes when i play with certain man that made it pro but aint pro no more i feel sick to my stomach at how they were at professional football clubs until a couple as late as 21 and had should of made careers out of playing in the top 2 leagues in this country but are not better then certain other guys i know who just love football but wernt given the chance because of racism/"being too small"

i get emotional just thinking about certain man who are pros but probably couldn't do 10 kick ups

/

nothing will change in england you will only have certain types of players and certain races will be excluded whilst others will be stuck in stereotypical positions because of there colour

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvGOe2t27k

[Michel Kane]

'Dinho >>>> ______________________________

[TF S4DK]

'Dinho >>>> ______________________________

This and amazed Walcott got 6 tbh.

[Guest Wheres Barry]

im gonna try that, im quite good at keepie uppies, rekon i could do 10 +

[Guest M12 Part 2]

u man watched till the end and realised dinho had a hole in his blindfold and could actually see whilst he was doing them 40 odd kickups

[Michel Kane]

*slaps forehead*

[Guest Wheres Barry]

read that...

how the f*ck can you be bored with a group of 20+ lads in an amazing country.... and playing the best sport in the world everyday.

f*ck*ng pricks.

[Mr Q]

Capello should surely try and convince Arteta to play.

[Michel Kane]

Surprised no-one's mentioned Josh McEachran, espcecially Chelsea fans.

Looks very promising, best player in England's u17 side.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYNcQcjslOI&feature=fvw