Tuesday 11 June 2013

Why The English Football Team Suck

Ever since the England Under 21 team got turfed out of the European Championship  after only their second game, the argument has been that there are too many foreigners standing in the way of emerging English talent.
The fact that Stuart Pearce was denied the best English players aged under 21 was pretty much ignored and the finger of blame is once again pointed at the foreign players blocking the way.
It seems to people with this mindset that the solution is to lower the playing standards of the Premier League because the truth is the British players are not coming through because the demand from supporters and directors at the clubs is instant success and managers haven't got time to develop from within so have to buy  and foreign players are cheaper than English ones.
A manager is not going to look at a players birth certificate before choosing him for his team, if he deems him good enough then he is going to play him regardless if he is English or not.
Fans would soon make their voices heard if their manager played a defence made up of Englishmen but found themselves in a relegation battle while the better defenders sat on the bench. 
The truth is we have only won one major trophy in 80+ years of trying and that was with home advantage so England not being very good is not a new phenomenon.
We failed to qualify for two of the three World Cups in the 70s and missed both the European Championships in the same decade but there was a 2 foreign player rule per team during that decade so what stopped the bright young things coming through then?   
The truth is to have national football success you need to have the extraordinary luck to have a group of great players at the same time and that rarely happens. The French team that dominated the late 1980s and early 2000's being a great example of having the luck of this happening and once the likes of Henry, Viera, Desailly, Zidane, Deschamp and Thuram retired, the French star waned.
England just havent got that Golden Generation of players coming through to replace the ones in the team at the moment and the halfway decent ones who could play at tournaments like the Under 21 European Championships have been promoted to the first team and are deemed above turning out for the under 21's unlike other nations who took and played their best available.
That isn't the foreign players fault or Stuart Pearce's who can expect to be handed his P45 on landing back home by the FA.

1 comment:

Lauren said...

That's a really honest yet true reflection, a really well written article. Good work.

Lauren x

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