England under-21s

[redjed]

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

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

[Drakes Way]

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.

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.

[Reg Smeeton]

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

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.

[mrverve]

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.

[DRS]

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.

[thepeoplesgame]

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.

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.

[Reg Smeeton]

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.

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

[Honkytonk]

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?)

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.