The last stand of the ‘golden generation’ ended in embarrassing circumstances on Sunday with England comprehensively annihilated by Germany in South Africa. It had been coming, almost from the moment the team landed – LFW attempts to put a finger on why.
A horrible inevitability
There are one or two stock phrases you’ll often find on LoftforWords. “Couldn’t find his arse with both hands,” for instance, will often be wheeled out when Scott Carson or somebody equally incompetent is in town, or “cold Tuesday night in Hartlepool” when an opponent looks League One bound.
Watching England finally get the comprehensive stuffing their attitude and performance levels have deserved on Sunday two lines that I have written time and time again about QPR during the past few years came to mind. The first, trotted out on a weekly basis when Flavio Briatore was bringing in kids from his mate’s clubs and sacking managers that couldn’t make them win games, was “not conducive to success”. The second is the definition of insanity, often wheeled out around this time of year when QPR fans start believing we’re going to win promotion this season, that says you are insane if you repeat the same action time after time and expect a different result.
England as a whole seems to believe every international tournament could be ‘the one’ despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The system in this country, from the way we bring players through to the way the teams at the very top of the game recruit talent, is not conducive to a successful national team. Maintaining this broken system and expecting every international tournament to somehow go differently to the one before is pure madness.
My experiences of football are limited – based on playing, refereeing and coaching youth football, watching, commentating and writing about the professional game. I know nothing about it in the grand scheme of things. The players and managers I criticise on LFW could drink me under the table on knowledge of tactics and systems and shapes. So treat this, a list of thoughts and feelings I’ve had since the final whistle went in the Germany game, as the layman's guide to what is wrong with the England team and disagree at your leisure through the usual channels.
- The way we coach players from a very young age is completely wrong. It has improved, in that the very youngest age groups now only play small sided games. But they still play with full sized footballs, they still move straight to eleven a side as soon as they hit ten or eleven and the emphasis is far too often on winning rather than developing skills. To win on an eleven a side pitch with eleven year olds you turn to the kids that are physically developing faster. The best player in the Scunthorpe league when my brother was growing up was a lad from Gainsborough who by the age of twelve was built like a 22 year old man complete with moustache. The other kids just couldn’t live with him and he scored nine or ten goals a week. By the age of 16 the other boys had caught him up and it turned out he couldn’t actually play the game, his basic skill level was poor because when they should have been teaching him, and his team mates, to control the football and use it the management at Gainsborough were simply revelling in the success brought by playing a 12 stone, six foot tall 11 year old against boys a quarter of his size.
- Youth football is invariably more for the parents than the children. When my brother started playing at age seven they were playing eleven a side – the rule change came in two years later necessitating six and seven aside on smaller pitches only, and the parents moaned like hell. The referees, and at times the children themselves, were regularly abused by those on the touchline as if it were a semi-pro non league game. I have seen fights between parents, fights between parents and officials, fights between managers and parents. I can count on the fingers of one hand the times I’ve seen children of ten, eleven, twelve years of age being coached properly. I coached a bit when my brother was involved in youth football and the nearest thing I have to a coaching badge is a GCSE in geography. Again, while that is slowly changing, we’re too bothered making sure the people in charge of running youth football aren’t paedophiles who will fiddle with the boys in the changing room rather than checking if they can actually teach them how to play football. Being willing, free on Sundays, and one of the players’ dads, is still enough reason to be in charge of the team. On the continent small sided games, smaller balls, skills based training are the norm and you can tell straight away in the technical ability of even the mediocre players from abroad.
- The English mentality is completely wrong. Yes the national side should play a high tempo, pressing match that applies pressure to opponents earlier and hunts for mistakes because that is how Premiership teams play and how English players are brought up. That should not change, it should be embraced as a strength, but it has to be married to a complete change in our attitude to ball control and possession. At the moment youth teams continue to focus on power, strength, speed, physical fitness etc. Again I refer back to my brother’s example as he is the best case study I have. He was picked up by Scunthorpe United in his mid teens and put in their youth set up. He wasn’t good enough to make it ultimately but boys that were, or could have been, were turned away for being too small while boys less able at football, but sporting impressive chests, were kept on. And Scunthorpe’s youth system was good at the time, regularly providing three or four first teamers at the end of each season. But the emphasis was all on speed and brute force, balls knocked into the channels. It was never about developing a player in anything other than muscle definition.
- The football coaching in schools is non-existent. Faced with one set of exams after another PE teaching time is often the thing to make way. The government attempted to tackle this by setting minimum amounts of time schools must have their students doing physical activity. In my day job as a news journalist I was presented with a picture story recently about a school that had introduced a scheme whereby the older children would teach the younger ones play ground games like hop-skotch and skittles. “Why did you come up with this idea?” I asked the headteacher who replied “Well this counts towards their three hours of physical activity a week.” So a measure brought in to tackle the abysmal sports coaching in schools that causes obesity levels to soar and participation in this country’s main sports to plummet is circumnavigated by bunging them a skipping road at lunchtime and leaving them to it. School sports days are often non-competitive, children are taught from an early age that winning is a bad thing because the less able children feel bad about losing when their talents should be embraced.
- And what of the talented lads who overcome all of this to reach the end of a youth or academy set up at a professional club and look to take the next step? Well if they’re really good they will quickly be poached by one of the big Premiership teams. They have little intention of actually developing the player for their first team, they’re just worried about them going on to be a big star with one of their rivals. So you get Chelsea, Tottenham and Man Utd hoarding young talent in vast academies, playing endless meaningless matches against other similar set ups. John Bostock is the best example, a first team regular at Crystal Palace, quickly snaffled by Spurs and plunged into a vast backroom set up that also swallowed our own Dean Parrett, and Kyles Naughton and Walker from Sheff Utd among others. None of them ever play for the first team, they have to go out on loan to see any action at all, but nobody else can have them and that was the aim in the first place. I know it’s hard to sympathise with Simon Jordan but Palace found Bostock, trained him up, gave him his chance, spent thousands upon thousands coaching him and all the rest of it. Then when Spurs wanted him they just took him, and the tribunal awarded Palace a pittance. Why should clubs bother to develop players when the ones they do bring through are just taken for next to nothing and bunged in a corner somewhere by a club that doesn’t really need them anyway?
- Still, at least in an academy they get regular action on decent pitches against decent standard opposition. For the boys Parrett left behind at QPR it’s park pitches and matches with Brighton, Barnet and Colchester. Again the emphasis is on winning – Joe Gallen’s notable achievement of winning the youth league two years running with our young lads was rightly trumpeted by the club but of that team only Angelo Balanta is in our first team squad now and he’s not in it very often. A competitive reserve league or A-team system would help, but such was the paucity of fixtures and rank quality of the opposition in the second string league Neil Warnock withdrew QPR from it this summer. QPR are currently asking boys of 18 and 19 to go from playing Barnet juniors on a park pitch to playing Championship football with only a match every six weeks against Aldershot reserves in between. The results are there for all to see in the first touches of players like Antonio German and Romone Rose. God bless them they work hard, and it’s wonderful to see players progressing through our own ranks, but they cannot even control the ball properly yet – that’s the first things kids in other countries are taught.
- Then say they are good enough. Good enough for the first team, good enough for the Premiership maybe. Well, if they’re really top notch then teams may take a chance on them – Adam Johnson, Daniel Sturridge, Tom Huddlestone. By take a chance I mean spend big money on them and, more to the point, throw huge amounts of cash at them. When Daniel Sturridge moved from Man City to Chelsea the wages being talked about were astronomical. Youth players used to clean the seniors’ boots, now they’re getting promised cars and all sorts. When Sheffield United junior Jordan Robertson killed a father of three in a road crash caused by him changing the songs on his Ipod while driving he was at the wheel of a Mercedes CLC 180. Jordan Robertson. I mean who the fuck is he? How can he afford a car like that? They don’t need to work hard for it these players, even the mediocre ones are treated like kings and paid stupid money. There’s no hunger, no desire there. They’re not taught to behave themselves, to look after themselves – they’re just promised the world. Arsene Wenger has brought about changes in this country in the way players eat and drink but he’s doing it with an entirely foreign first team at Arsenal. Young men are mad overnight millionaires and left to spend it however they like - mostly in night clubs and car show rooms.
- So English players are expensive to produce yourself, expensive to obtain from somebody else, and come through a system that is simply not conducive to producing good footballers. They’re over paid, under worked, badly behaved and poorly motivated. Is it any wonder then that clubs across Europe are increasingly looking to Eastern Europe and Africa for their talent? Inter Milan won the Italian league this year without an Italian in their team, Italy crashed out of the World Cup at the group stages. On any given weekend in the Premiership only five of the teams are regularly picking an English goalkeeper and we all know the difficulties we’re having in that position at national level. EU rules prevent blanket restrictions on foreign players – but rugby league and cricket both have variations on the system and the Football League is introducing a ‘homegrown players’ rule from this season. The Premier League could have a rule necessitating a set number of players eligible to play for the national side be in every matchday squad if it wanted to. That wouldn’t be the ultimate answer – you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of foreign players in our domestic leagues in the 1970s when our national team was similarly dreadful and failed to qualify for World Cups, and by forcing teams to pick English players brought up by the broken system you may just be increasing the cash rewards on offer to mediocre English players. But it would help if the England manager had a bigger pool of players to pick from. As it stands the Championship England international will soon become a regular feature – Stuart Pearce is already forced down a division for most of his scouting trips as Under 21 boss.
- Then again for those that do make it at the highest level is the ultimate accolade being picked for England? No. There is a firm club over country attitude in this country. Sure, England matters now because otherwise we’d have to watch tennis but in six months we’ll have a Wednesday night qualifying game with Bulgaria for Euro 2012 and players will be withdrawing through pitiful minor injuries, managers will be moaning about fixture congestion, people will be talking about burn out and so on. If you want your national team to succeed then that qualifying game should be the biggest match of the month. All attention should be geared towards it, the players should be relishing it, preparations must be meticulous. Instead, in this country, all the talk will be of injuries and players not being fit for the following week’s oh so important Champions League group game. I’m guilty of it, most of us are. Apart from during the summer England games merely get in the way – and even in the summer I’d still take QPR winning something next season over England lifting the World Cup every single time. Most of the players would rather win the Champions League than the World Cup. Representing your country is not the be all and end all it once was – as the players got off the plane after the Germany game Ashley Cole and Ledley King were shown live on television in fits of laughter, 12 hours after total humiliation for this footballing nation. It’s hard to argue against the thought that this lot simply don’t give much of a toss.
- And yet still, despite all of this, despite the broken youth system, the lack of English talent in the top flight, the abysmal attitude of the players, the preference for club over country in most cases and so on – despite all of that we still expect the national tam to go and perform at World Cups. Even when England have been good in recent times – a balanced side, well managed, with strength in depth – they have only ever made the semi finals in 1990 and 1996. They are, on their very best day, a quarter final side. So we spend millions and millions recruiting an expensive coach, and then we extend his contract before the finals even start because we think he might go to Inter Milan. Then after we don’t perform well at the tournament we want to pay him off and sack him. It’s this sort of short termism that infects out game from the moment seven year old kids start kicking a football around. There's no long term plan. We think we should be winning World Cups and European Championships so we pay good club managers four, five or six times as much as their rivals (Maradona earns £860,000 a year as Argentina manager, Joachim Loew gets £1.3m, Capello is paid more than £6m a year) to do just that and then when they fail we sack them. There's no mandate to overhaul the youth set up, or target for four, six and eight years time. Just 'you, win this tournament for us.'
- So what did our expensive short term fix coach do? Well initially he did everything right – he said he would only pick players who were playing regularly for their clubs, who were fit and not carrying injury, and who were playing well. There would be no repeat of the Sven favourites that saw the same faces every match regardless of form and fitness and resulted in the farcical situation in Northern Ireland where an England side that had David Beckham in some bizarre deep lying quarter back role he’d engineered for himself beaten by a goal from Leeds United’s reserve team forward. But then Capello had a problem, because somehow Emile Heskey snuck onto the pitch while nobody was looking and played well and the theory from people who purport to know about football was born that said England play well with Heskey, Rooney plays better with Heskey, we’re all better off with Heskey and if you scratched your head and thought “that’s not right” well I’m afraid you simply don’t know football well enough. So Heskey played whenever fit – despite not being very good, or scoring many goals, or playing regularly for Aston Villa, or indeed doing anything that Capello had initially said you had to do to get in his team. And that started a bit of a floodgate situation because then Rio Ferdinand wasn’t fit, or playing well, or playing regularly, but he has to be picked really as well. And Ledley King, who has such bad knees he can’t even train, got picked. And Jamie Carragher, who has been a spent force at club level for 12 months and retired from international football long ago. And Paul Scholes, although he had the good grace to turn the desperate plea down. Despite all the good things he’d said and did during qualifying Capello still resorted to the same mistakes made by his predecessors – he still played a rigid 442, he still tried to crowbar Lampard and Gerrard in together, he still picked favourites like Heskey and ignored alternatives like Crouch even when all logic, form and fact pointed to him being wrong, he still made ridiculous subsitutions and he went to the World Cup with no clear idea of what his best side was, Had he stuck with his mantra of only picking players in form, in their club sides, and free of injury our World Cup squad would have looked vastly different and stood a better chance of progressing. Had he picked a system that suited the players, rather than forcing the players into a system, we’d still be there now. Cesc Fabregas is a splendid Premier League midfielder, as is Frank Lampard. Fabregas doesn’t get in the Spain squad because he is too similar to the players already there, Lampard and Gerrard continue to comprehensively mark each other out of England games ten years after this problem was identified. Spain, Holland, Brazil and so on all have a system, a pattern of play, and the players have to fit into that. Sometimes it means a player like Fabregas will only make the bench but it's better than England's method of simply throwing in all the best individual players and winning games only when those individuals play well. Argentina still win and play well when Messi doesn't perform, for England if Gerrard and or Rooney are below par we struggle because we have nothing else.
- And yet, as only the English could really, the criticism levelled at him has been mainly based around his nationality, which is completely irrelevant, and the fact that he tried to discipline the poor little darlings. A luxury hotel, a place in your nation’s World Cup squad, multi million pound contracts – try and instill a little bit of discipline in them and suddenly all the toys come out of the pram. When we didn't qualify for the last Euros it was Steve McLaren's fault, when we were knocked out of previous World Cups it was Sven's fault, and now apparently it's all Capello's fault. When are we going to wake up and see that the manager is only a very, very tiny part of the problem. Three managers with vastly different personalities, backgrounds and styles have failed to take this team anywhere - that should tell you that they're just a figurehead for a whole world of problems.
- This blame the manager culture is led by the British media, who must also take their share of responsibility. It is our media that build the team, the players and the manager up to being something they're not. It is our pundits and press who propel this myth that we're some sort of global sleeping giant who will come good at a tournament. It's our media that rip the players apart for not performing thereby building a culture of fear among the team and yet it's our media that undermine the team at every opportunity by publishing various sordid stories about their private life. Personally I think if you're an England player you should probably be aware of where you're sticking your knob, or what you're stuffing up your nose, down your throat or in your lungs because it is bound to end up in the papers. They get everything they deserve really. But to bemoan infighting and dressing room unrest after going to town on a story about the captain shagging the reserve left back's EX girlfriend is a little hypocritical in my opinion.
The result of all of this is a poorly brought up, poorly behaved, arrogant, over paid, over rated group of players chucked together as a collection of individuals and expected to not only gel as a coherent team, but excel and win against nations with far better player development systems, far superior long term planning, lower expectations and clear patterns of play and systems. When put like that, making it to the World Cup and out of the group at all seems like quite a decent achievement.
So what now?
A complete overhaul. A national team manager with a focus on building an England team for the next ten years – out with the likes of Gerrard, Lampard, Terry, Heskey and James, in with the likes of Hart and Milner and Adam Johnson. A change in attitude at youth level where the emphasis switches to skill, ball control and possession rather than winning at all costs for the sake of the parents. The gallows for any youth coach who releases a player because he's too small. School leagues, more PE lessons, competitive and talented children encouraged. A ban on clubs poaching players aged less than 20 from other sides, even if their contracts are up. A severe restriction on how much teenagers can be paid. A set number of English players in every matchday squad, on every matchday. A proper youth and reserve league for all clubs so young talent can be brought through gradually in house. A culture among managers, players and supporters where the national team comes first – if you object to fixture congestion that much, stop taking them off to the Far East on shirt selling tours for six weeks before the start of the season then. A long term view of the national side where players are identified early and brought through the U18s and U21s playing in the positions they will be used in at full level, in the same system the full team uses rather than simply picking whichever Ledley King is the latest flavour of the month two weeks before the tournament kicks off. A committed manager, on a sensible wage, given a full remit on improving the national side and the youth sides beneath it and a list of specific targets to meet so we're not sacking managers at great expense whenever the press think they've not done well enough. A Lilleshall style national football academy at Burton upon Trent, recommended years ago but ignored ever since.
Or, back to the Premiership in August. Richard Keys babbling on about it being the best league in the world. Another England manager appointed, built up, and then destroyed by the press. Another load of unknown foreign imports into the top flight. Another load of Man Utd players pulling out of the first England squad of the season because their toe hurts or their finger nail is hanging off. More criticism of the amount of qualifiers England have to play. More clamour for Michael Dawson/Joe Cole/ Ledley King/Matthew Upson to play followed by absolute vilification of them when they turn out not to be good enough. More managers moaning about fixture congestion three months after jetting off to Thailand for three friendly matches. More players busting a gut to beat the third best team in Macedonia in the fifth group match of the Champions League, then making minimum effort against the Macedonian national team in an England qualifier a week later. And then in two years time another tournament which our media will hype up and fans up and down the country will say we could win. Despite all these facts and many more besides clearly shining the opposite straight in our faces.