Andy Lyons asks Nottingham Forest manager Paul Hart about the way young players are brought up in England and the pitfalls of blooding them at an early age

With Howard Wilkinson now departing as England’s technical director, how successful would you say his reforms have been?
In terms of getting clubs to focus on producing young players, I think he’s been pretty successful. The criteria laid down to become an academy, including the fact that all players have to live within an hour and half’s travelling time of the club they join, I think was neccesary. It depends which end of the scale you’re at. If you’re one of the bigger clubs, then I don’t know whether they would see it as restrictive for their recruitment. But for me it’s been the right thing. We had three Notts boys last year represent England at different levels.

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There are more Latvians than you might think in English football – it's just that very few are actually appearing on the pitch. Daunis Auers numbers them off

Rather unexpectedly, the late 1990s saw an exodus of the best Latvian footballers to England. It was actively encouraged by the spectacularly unsuccessful (yet annoyingly optimistic) former manager of the national side, Gary Johnson. It all seemed a bit odd because, despite a promising start to Euro 2004 qualifying, the national side is essentially crap and the eternal champions, Skonto FC, have never set Europe alight. Indeed, Latvian football in general has a Ven­ables-like tradition of glorious failure: Skonto 2-1 up at Barcelona with a few minutes to go in qualifying for the 1997-98 Champions League, only to lose 3-2; outplaying Scotland in the first 2002 World Cup qualifier only to lose to a last-minute Don Hutchison goal; having an 86th-minute winner against Sweden in the first Euro 2004 qualifier wrongly disallowed for off­side. I could go on. But I won’t.

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Titi Camara was the catalyst for Harry Redknapp's departure from West Ham, and Glenn Roeder isn't too keen either. Darron Kirkby looks at the brief highlights

In his first 20 months with West Ham, Titi Camara played only 485 minutes – and just 94 of them were at home. Perhaps more than any other player, Titi’s bearing on the club’s history is completely disproportionate to his on-field contribution. Five months after he joined for £1.7 million, the man who signed him, Harry Redknapp, was out of a job. The most regularly aired reason put forward for his departure was that the board had lost faith in his judgment after Redknapp had squandered what little of the Rio Ferdinand money he  had been given on the likes of Rigobert Song, Ragnvald Soma and, above all, Titi Camara.

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Squads are now so vast that players can sink to the bottom and never come up again. Matthew Hall goes in search of Mark Bosnich

Three years ago, Mark Bosnich had it all. He had turned down Juventus to rejoin his beloved Man­chester United, the club he spent three seasons with as a teenager a decade earlier, as successor to Peter Sch­meichel. During the same summer, after a night that ended in a police cell, he had remarried. Happy at work and happy at home, the future was bright. Three years later, the sunglasses are well and truly off, most likely replaced by pyjamas, slippers and a blanket. Mark Bos­nich doesn’t get out much these days, and in that relatively short space of time, Bosnich has felt the wrath of Sir Alex Ferguson, then his new wife and now Claudio Ranieri.

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The European Union is expanding as rapidly as the waistlines of retired footballers. Al Needham puzzled over an event that brought the two together

The Europe United Masters tournament was held at the London Arena on a miserable October Sunday, wedged between the Disney Channel Kids Awards and Beauty and the Beast On Ice. It had a weird premise: the Foreign Office decided that the best way to mark the admission of ten new coun­tries to the European Union was to organise a kick­about for retired foot­ballers, some of them not exactly re­nowned for their Europhilia (one of the British Masters squad once said living in Italy was like being in a foreign country and another famously told Norway to “Fuck off”). Mind you, if you needed reminding that there have been worse ideas, we’re only a stone’s throw away from the Millennium Dome.

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