jasoñ voorhees wrote:


That is blatantly not true. Argentina 2002, Denmark 2002, Croatia 2004, Sweden 2006, all under Sven, all much better than anything England produced in the last two weeks.

England could hardly string three passes together against Ukraine or Italy. They were better against Sweden and in the first half of the France game. In the second half of the France game, they retreated to their own half and let the French come at them. I lost count of the number of times in this tournament that an English pass rolled harmlessly along the turf, over the touchline and out for an opposition throw-in, having missed its intended target by anything between five and ten yards.

No, really, I am not. It is terrifying. Coaches are willfully stopping kids from playing that way in order to win games and leagues. Some smart-arse on here a while back asked me if I knew so much about coaching, how come my lads' team lost so many games. This is exactly the attitude of most coaches.

If they were to try and play like Messi or Xavi, they would have coaches and/or parents on their back. I mean I have said to Bored Jr to stop doing step overs but that is only when he does four in row and he is in defence. I actually tell them not to "get rid" or "hoof it" out of defence but to only pass when they are sure it will go to one of their own players.

Similarly, coaches, whether they are supporters of those sort of teams or not, often say that they wouldn't have the boys play that way as "well, they aren't good enough, are they?" not realising why they aren't good enough (if that is, indeed, the case).

Don't get me wrong, I am not the only one swimming against the tide on this. I would say that 1 in 5 coaches wants their kids to have fun first and foremost and 1 in 10 wants their kids learning good technique at the cost of winning leagues at 12.

Another anecdote that may or may not be relevant. It was out presentation night on Friday and I was telling some new parents who had arrived that it was funny how all the managers thought that they were being interviewed by Sky when they got the mic with all the "We started slow early doors in the season then after Christmas, we kicked on" etc etc. After a couple for not too long speeches, our under 13s coach came onstage. He used to manage Chippenham Town and took them to the FA Vase and doesn't seem to have changed his ideas.

The first thing he said was "What you need to know about me and my assistant manager is that we are the most driven competitive people you will meet and we play to win. The players that we have play to win as well and work hard. He then went on to say that a lot of the players were crap when he first got them and some of them still were.

13 year olds, he was talking about. I could have wept

Indeed but you need the coaches to want to teach it as well. That is why I am pessimistic. When I took my coaching badge, the emphasis was on fun and enjoyment over winning and you could tell most of the coaches were just paying lip service to the idea to pass the exam

Hmm, the point wasn't made being made quite so forcefully when we were young though. For the last four years tika taka as ruled the earth. Every time you watch spain you see players gliding into space to receive the ball, and laying it off to a teammate. You see xavi getting praise for making 120 passes in a game.

if you are growing up in this era, you will take all of this for granted. This has a much bigger effect on players than you would think. Stevie G grew up wanting to be Bryan Robson, and I'm afraid it shows. Imagine if the best midfielder of his day was a pass and move machine? He'd look at the game very differently.

Haven't read back all through this thread but I was just thinking earlier: isn't there almost a case for saying that England overachieve in tournaments? England have been technically poorer than most other international tournament participants in the 30-odd years I've been watching them (possible, but only partial, exceptions: 90, 96, 98, 2004). Yet they've almost always qualified for each finals, and almost always got through the group stages. In fact, England are unbeaten in 11 games in group games at finals, stretching back to the defeat by France in 2004. England are actually remarkably good at snatching results when playing poorly, an attribute they showed again this time.

So in answer to the original question: no, England weren't any better this time (though they were better organised and disciplined and more likeable, in that limited England way of theirs). But that's absolutely no surprise, given the micro-circumstances (a new, much-deried manager having six weeks to gel with a squad which in turn was battered by injuries) and the wider circumstances, in that at no level of English football is the game organised and structured in a way that will enable the national team to succeed, from the coaching of kids to the all-consuming greed of the Premier League.

The difference is, TAB, that Bryan Robson was English. Coaches here are more likely to say that English kids can't or possibly shouldn't play a Spanish, French or whatever way. It has only started to get through to some professional coaches that it is perfectly possible to coach British players to play in a manner that will rely on greater ball control and possession.

Like I have said, coaches don't even bother to try and get their kids to play with their weaker foot so to get them to play a 'non-British" style of play takes some convincing. Some of them may even take the view that it is boring for kids to pass the ball rather than running around after high balls.



Depends, doesn't it, on whether you look at population, figures of players participating, coaching etc. As far as the first two are concerned, they are possibly underachieving. In terms of the latter, they are possibly overachieving. What you do have to say is that the records suggest that they are a quarter final team and they have achieved that this time

The Awesome Berbaslug!!! wrote:


Isn't the concern that children playing football are not really absorbing the greater technique of the (largely foreign) players they are now seeing play but instead focussing on the whistles and bells that surround it. The pervasive nature of the current culture of "skillz" and "tekkers" means they are practising tricks and signature moves rather than the fundamentals of actual passing and movement.

My son is 5 and we've been kicking around with a small goal in the back garden since he was 2 or 3. He started Football Club at his reception class this term and in the weeks since when we play he wants to show me his "skills" which consisted of a rudimentary (though admittedly quite impressive) step-over. He can now also show me two different alternate celebrations (shirt swinging over head, sliding on knees). This is at a stage where I've just about got him mainly passing with the instep.

I know he's getting it from the boys in his class/club with older brothers and I know it's the same boys who are encouraging him to spike up his hair with water at playtime and I'm not at all sure it's necessarily going to result in an increased aptitude for receiving the ball, laying it off and finding space.

@ BC

Dead on.

After lots of practise, practise, practise, practise, practise, thirty percent of the guitar becomes the guitarist and seventy percent of the guitarist becomes the guitar. At football's very top level the ball and the player should be just like that. But every time I see a short pass bouncing off James Milner's shins I realise, once again, that — even if they possess the vision — most English players just don't have that type of integrated, embodied relationship with their tools.

I suspect Hodgson understands that, and perhaps he can come up with a way of mitigating against it. I sort of doubt it, but wish him luck and hope for some improvement at least. Trouble is if, by some bizarre chance, England ever did win one of the two major tournaments, you just know the orgy of self-congratulation would set back player development for another half-century.

There may be something in that but the skills are actually great for kids to do for a couple of reasons. Firstly, tricks and signature moves all involve dedicated time on the ball and this is fundamental to confidence and familiarity with the ball that in itself leads to better ball control. Secondly, such skills are actually great warm-up exercises. Thirdly, they may actually have the opportunity to use them occasionally on the pitch. Fourthly and most importantly, they are great fun.

You are right though that they should be alternating this with even passing the ball against a wall or something like we used to. Obviously, the main thing they should be doing though when they are all playing together is playing small-sided games with each other. That is what is really going to help them and it is more fun for them.

That and playing in the back garden with you. I always say that the lads that have older brothers who they can play one-on-one against in a back garden are going to learn more from that any coach. Dads are a decent enough substitute. Playing with their mates in the playground as well

The other obvious deficiency in England teams is a mental one - not in the "believe you can do it, you brave warriors!" sense - but in the way players think, or rather don't, on the pitch. There was a spot-on editorial in WSC after one of the recent tournament failures (2006 perhaps?) which simply pointed out that English players aren't encouraged to think for themselves out on the pitch, which is one of the main reasons why you see so little overlapping, so little switching of flanks, so little creative use of space in off-the-ball movement. This aspect of England's play never, ever seems to change.

Sake, what's going on with this board

Flynnie wrote:


England have won a rugby world cup in recent memory, haven't they? Can't say that about England in football. Losing to Wales is no great shame, is it? It's Wales most popular sport

I felt in Italia 90 that there were moments when the team did think things through, such as persuading Robson to change to 3-5-2 then having the ability to implement it; but that was a team in which Lineker and Waddle were bringing experience from abroad, Beardsley was a very clever player, and Gascoigne had immense natural talent.

Since then, they've been good once at home, and good once when Sven was still a coach rather than a self-parody.

One quibble with using "Sweden 2006" as an example of passing: I can't reconcile that with my memory of them needing Crouch to pull a defender's hair in order to get past T&T. For me the lineage of half-decent technical teams stops at 2004.

[quote="Reed John" post=683483]Flynnie wrote:



Don't let the Gogs hear you say that.

Yeah the Sweden game in 2006 was a bit of dead-rubber game, and hard to single out as an example of producing technically sound, entertaining football in a game that really mattered. Especially as it followed two excruciatingly unwatchable victories over mediocre opposition (Paraguay, T&T) and was followed by another one (Ecuador).

It has indeed basically been almost unremittingly grim since 2004

Who are the gogs?

Losing to a smaller country, even a much smaller country, may or may not prove anything if that country has enough passion for the game to have a decent development system. In hockey, for example, Slovakia can beat anybody on any given day in an international tournament. Slovakia's top 1000 players probably don't match up with the top 1000 players in Russia or Canada or even the USA, but when it's just the top 20 then we're talking about the very far righthand side thin wedgy bit of the bell curve for either country's talent pool and therefore getting close to the limits of human performance in the sport so it's evenly matched.



Given all of these problems with English youth football, I wonder how many right-thinking parents of keen young players will just say "fuck it, we're sending our kids abroad to train properly." I don't know what kind of barriers there are to that, but we certainly see lots of kids moving vast distances to train in tennis and hockey, for example. It seems like it wouldn't be too hard to imagine a big exodus of promising 13 and 14 year old British players to France, Spain, Holland, Germany, or even the some of the burgeoning academies in the USA. They'd get better at football and have a great educational experience too.

Or is it just the nature of football that the earliest feasible time to send a kid out on his own - 13 or 14, I'd guess - is too late to start playing the game properly?


I think this discussion is really the most important football-related thing we talk about on here. What could be more important than teaching kids and building the future of the game?

The issue of the Premier League's deleterious effect on development is interesting. How is it then that the big money clubs in other countries aren't stifling their country's youth development? Are Real Madrid and Barcelona plowing lots of money into grassroots Spanish football?

Reed, "gogs" are people from North Wales. Rugby is primarily played in South Wales, as far as I was aware.

Reed, my sense is that there are probably as many US teenagers training with European clubs as there are English players. The mentality is very different from the US attitude, or for that matter, the mentality in many Eastern European and other "developing" football countries.

Barca's youth system currently features a very noticeable number of African and Asian (primarily Korean) players, and Inter's also includes quite a number of Eastern Europeans.

It certainly isn't unknown. Owen Hargreaves was a little too old to count but I am sure there was a younger Welsh lad that had been playing with a Spanish team but I am sure his family had connections out there if, indeed, they didn't actually live there.

As it seeps through to parents that British junior football coaching is just not fit for purpose, perhaps it will increase. Maybe it is this that has convinced the FA to buck up their ideas but I doubt it.



No, not at all. I still think that academies are picking kids up too young, not least for education and welfare reasons. Astonishingly, I had a couple of lads saying that they thought they had missed the boat to be professional footballers because academies hadn't picked them up at 12. Luckily, I was able to mention Grant Holt (albeit I didn't mention that he was at Carlisle as a kid before his non-league travels). Similar with Ashley Barnes. He was at Paulton Rovers until he was 18.



Indeed but too many people don't see the connection between the mistakes or good coaching at this age and when they are older. I am not just talking about techniques and skills that coach (or neglect to) at this level that are harder to coach when they are older. I am talking about children being put off playing football because they are ousted to the bench until the last 10 minutes if at all thereby they never improve. Children put off by bullying or over-aggressive coaches or parents.

I certainly feel a lot of these responsibilities, leaving aside that, in total, these lads' parents pay almost £1800 a year towards their coaching. In answer to your question though, what is more important than teaching kids and building the future of the game is that the kids have fun and love playing football.

I have always said that I would be much happier to hear that the lads I have coached continue to love playing football for as long as possible, like I do, at any level than having one who becomes a professional footballer.

As it happens, I think that, for the lads I coach, the methods I use and that are used by more progressive countries can do both

Owen Hargreaves is Canadian. His career is typical of the North American players that Ursus mentioned, who go to Europe in their late teens.