Thetownend.com

Terrible tournament from arguably our best young players. Watched the Israel game and and was not impressed with any of them.
Not sure if a change in manager will have any effect on the current lack of talent in the country.     

Zaha is going to be a good player...the contrast between our lads and the likes of the Italians, Dutch, Spanish and Germans is stark.

Part of the problem was that they aren't our best under-21 players. Jones, the Ox, Rodwell etc. should have been there and not in Brazil.

The main problem is that clubs in the countries I mentioned see the importance for their domestic game in having a decent national team, and therefore are prepared to work with their FA's towards that goal....in England that doesn't happen. Increasingly, the national team is seen as a hinderance....an attitude backed by many fans, who have no interest in te national team.  I can see the Qatar WC, really bringing this into open....as there's no way the Prem will allow it's players to go there for a summer WC.

Fair points all, but Germany are also going home.

The main problem with the under 21's is not lack of players, this has always been a problem, Owen, Rooney, Gerrard, Beckham etc never played for them.  The problem is Stuart Pearce, in this country we alway mistake passion for ability. Pearce may be a good coach/top bloke, but he's a terrible manager, who along with his selectors has time and time again picked an unbalanced squad.  When Peter Taylor was in charge, the team was a joy to watch, and you actually got the feeling the players were being developed.

Was he a terrible manager when we got to the final 4 years ago?

It's a combination of factors. I'd get rid of Brooking, who has done nothing to improve coaching and youth development and is a dinosaur, and I also think having a businessman at the head of the FA is counter-intuitive.

We walked the qualifying group and then lost all 3 of our championship matches.

England just never seem to be able to perform when it really matters. Is it lack of big game bottle?

I've always wondered exactly what Brooking did to get a knighthood.

Is it right the the U21 squad lost players to the Brazil friendly?

If so, then why bother with U21 at all.

Yes Pearce was a bad manager when we got to the final 4 years ago, we were lucky to get there. In fairness to Pearce, it did look like he had practised penalties though. In that championship just like this one, Pearce overlooked the need for strikers, we just attacked set pieces better (and we didn't have goals ruled out for phatom offences)

Completely agree with the Brooking comments, Howard Wilkinson appeared to do more with less in his time.

Norway released players from their senior side to the U21 side despite having a qualifier.

There's no long term vision in English football and that's the biggest issue.

Well there is...to make shed loads of money for the Prem and tbf it's worked a treat. 

Can you trust an FA to make the right decisions who have history in monumental cock ups, Kevin Keegan, Graham Tayour, Steven Mclaren, Howard Wilkinson et al.

The problems are with the FA.

I was talking about the national team but there's no denying the monumental success of the EPL

Because it's run by businessmen. I understand it has to be run in a financially sensible manner, but having the important jobs filled with businessmen is daft. Fuck, I hate Alex Ferguson, but he'd do a better job than anyone there at the moment. You want people who know what's going on in football and have ideas on how to fix it. It's still an old boy's club.

The general problem with everything now, not just football is the lack of long-term vision. Doesn't matter what aspect of life you look at, no-one looks/plans beyond a maximum of 4 years.

Limit the no of foreigners that can play in each Prem side, ditch the u21 league.
Too much focus had been on trying to mirror other nations. Pointless.

He must have been bloody lucky. I mean getting to the final of a major tournament and being so poor as well. Yes we had a bit of luck along the way but every team needs that. I would suggest that Stuart Pearce is a reasonable manager who's under achieved this tournament but done pretty well over a number of years with the tools at his disposal.

our best u21 side would have got a lot further.

Pretty much this, limit foreigners to 2 or 3 per team and maybe do like they do in Scotland where you have to name 3 U21 players in the matchday squad.

Think it would be quite interesting to require three under 21 y/o players who would qualify for the national team.  Fucksight more interesting than just trawling the world for foreign players and would surely benefit England in the future.

England Under 21's , England senior team it doesn't matter. The whole Burton training centre papers over the cracks and is an absolute waste of money. Sure more people may play football but it wont be a "centre of excellence to breed world class players". Quite simply the problem is without being racist is the amount of foreigners playing in the Premier League due to the obscene amount of money in that league. The FA says they want to attract the best players in the world to play in their league, well fair enough but it is at the expense of the England national team who will NEVER win a major tournament in the foreseeable future because Young players are not getting experience. No good sending them on loan, young players need experience against top players and that's the problem so until the FA caps the amount of foreign players a team has build your Burton Training centre, but it wont do fuck all because the players coming out of it will never get a look.

The PL is effectively a global league being played on English soil.
Not a problem in itself if the best English players could develop in a competitive league (such as the Championship) until they are ready to play regularly at that level.
However, too many of the best of the young English are instead playing in reserve and U21 leagues with occasional bench-warming duties for first teams.

People often blame the money in the Premier League for the poor performance of the England team, but lets be fair the England team were shit long before the Premier League formed.

The difference was that the teams in the first division were then full of Scots, Welsh and Irish players whereas now they come from all over the place.


We failed to qualify for the 1974 & 1978 World Cups don't forget, even the most cynical fan could hardly blame the premier league for that.

I don't buy the argument that our players are shit and we're not developing talent. Think the real problem is the team not performing to their full ability in major tournaments and if we weren't so shit at taking penalties we would most likely have won another major tournament by now. They need to get a team of sports psychologists in to figure out what the fuck happens to them when they're in the spotlight.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNERlJLo1no

It seems to me that the players dont give a monkeys about playing for the national team. Lets compare them to the egg chasers, they play a international the first differance you see is that the rugby lot sing the national anthem with gusto and seem to be proud that they are singing it ,in fact you look at any of our teams and individuals they all look like they are proud to play for our country. then you look at the football team, it looks like they are embarressed about singing it and it looks like they couind'nt be bovvered, surly by singing the anthem it should inspire them to do well, but no we always seem lethargic and indifferent.
 In a way we do have to blame the EPL, it seems  they do not want to really develope there own players but spend millions on overpaid prima donnas from over seas, the exception being Arsenal who seem to bring a lot of younger players and develope then into large selling assets to other clubs, trouble is in the main they are also overseas players. "sic"
As someone else has said on here we have to make sure thatthat we have under 21 players on the bench and also we are going to have to cap the number of non-english player taking part in a game, say at least 5 of any team has to be english, surly with  that in place we will  begin to find world class players again who look comfotable on the ball and not looking to pass it to the first player they see, as if they are holding a hot potatoe.
 I know this will never happen with all the money that is in the EPL, but we can always live in hope :no:

Too much money without doing anything to deserve it. Clubs are petrified of losing young "stars" to rivals in case one of them turns out to be a Rooney so they pay them silly amounts. Players lose motivation to properly improve and dedicate themselves to the game as they've already made it.

It's a shame the terrestrial channels couldn't have kept the rights to show live football league matches from the football league once the premier league had split (or did they for a period?)
 

Ah, the good old national anthem argument. Always sound logic implied there.

Yeah but you always see the egg chasers giving it a go :sherlock:

Have to agree with the first part of this. Too many Premier League squads are bloated with average players from other countries.

All clubs (both EPL and FL) should have quotas on both the percentage of foreign players in the overall squad as well as the number of players in the matchday squad.

The obvious answer is to change the National Anthem...the much vaunted egg chasers, sang it recently v the Welsh, and promptly got thrashed and Wales isn't even a country and its players weren't singing the National Anthem.

If you look at England play whether it's the first team or u21s you don't see them keeping hold of the ball long enough, if you look at other countries they pass the ball to players who are marked because they've been coached to have the confidence to recieve the pass. When a techinally gifted player does come through they're not used properly, take Hoddle for example. Scholes was used as a left winger in 2004 to accommodate Gerrard and Lampard who are inferior players.

What you need is better coaching at club level, not so much at the big clubs but lower down the pyramid where these players are coming from, there also needs to be a cap of foreign players to help get young British players game time in the PL.

I think what you need is your own stamp on the game and to play the same system all the way through.It amazes me that the u16s 18s 21s and senior teams play four different systems. Look at spain last night,any one of those players could step up and know instantly what system they will play.

The second half of this sentence is the key, in my opinion. If you watched the game against Norway, and to some extent against Israel, England had a lot of possession - something like 70 per cent against Norway. The problem is what we did, or rather didn't do, with it. Knocking it from side to side on the halfway line while the other team sits off and watches is fine while you wait for an opening to attack, but it's no way to play for 90 minutes. We created about three or four goalscoring chances in 270 minutes of football in Israel because we lacked the skill, drive, confidence, ambition and awareness to open teams up.

In a way it's like comparing the 'possession' football played at Swindon by Paul Hart's team and Paolo Di Canio's. Hart seemed to think possession was an end in itself, which is a state England have got themselves into by overcompensating for our traditional weakness of giving the ball away cheaply, while Paolo's teams knew kept hold of the ball until they saw a chance to pounce and go for the jugular. Alright we missed a lot of those chances, but we created so many and that meant we could get away with having profligate strikers!

England need to identify a group of 16-year-olds at clubs they can trust to coach them properly and then try to feed that group through the international system at every level. By the time they get to an U21 European Championships they will have been to U17, U18, U19 World Cups etc. They need to convince the clubs that sending their players to play international football will help their development, not hinder it. These kids aren't playing 60 club games a season, there is no reason they can't turn up for international qualifiers and summer tournaments. Come to that, there is no reason Oxlade-Chamberlain couldn't have played in Brazil and Israel.

The End. Sorry.

Spain are lucky, insofar as they benefit from a number of pieces of good fortune....firstly the money in La Liga isn't evenly distributed, so middling clubs like Getafe, will use Spanish players, rather than buying in from abroad. Barca have a philosophy of developing their own players schooled at La Masia, so they play the Barca way....stick 4 or 5 in a national team and ask them to play that way, so it's partly job done.  The Basque clubs, in the case of Bilbao, only play Basques, and Sociedad play mainly Basques....so straight away talent gets a chance to develop.

This means when del Bosque, goes to watch a game, say Espanyol v Getafe he'll be watching maybe 14 or so Spanish qualified players.  What has done my head in this season is Newcastle...you'd like to think they'd have philosphy a bit like Sociedad...namely develop players mainly from the north, after all the NE is supposed to be a hotbed of football, but no they sign about a dozen Frenchmen...so if Hodgson went to see say Newcastle v Fulham he might be lucky if 2 England qualified players were on display

It would be good to have Lower League matches on terrestrial telly regularly. Fuck knows TV on Saturdays is shite anyway. What with the F1, the Cricket, the Football (although BT will help a little bit there), all on Sky, the only sport you can regularly watch on terrestrial is egg-chasing.

I do think there's a difficult issue involving young players that is getting worse, with the talented ones being bought by a big team, then lost within their youth system/ignored in favour of the latest wonderkid from abroad.

The rules for transfers are ever-changing, but the problem is that the big clubs can now cherry-pick the best and then lose them within the system. The new academy rules and so on, if not paired with rules about players getting a certain amount of gametime/appearances per season, will basically just lead to rich Premier League teams getting all the best young players who then end up bench warming, or wasting their careers not getting games, who would otherwise have a future advancing through the ranks of the Football League, getting plenty of games and becoming a better player as a result of it.

It's difficult, because there are arguments as to how better facilities can improve a player, but personally, I think simply getting games week in, week out, is a much better way of giving a young player experience and improving them than any brand spanking new up to date training facility.