English football - the future

The England squad warm up

English football is in a flux of pure panic. Blighted by a sense of opportunity lost, of a ‘golden generation’ that was allowed to slip by without much notice, new FA chairman Greg Dyke has taken the parapet and laid blame for his country’s failings at the door of the Premier League. Too many foreigners, he says. Not enough opportunity for ‘our boys’.

Such a cut and dry theory is all too simplistic. The disease of failure runs far deeper than that. Of course, a league with only 32% of English qualified players doesn’t help the cause, but England haven’t won a major tournament since 1966. Indeed, semi-finals have only been achieved twice further, in 1990 and ’96, and of those, only 1990 was on foreign soil. These are the anomalies. The reality is stark; the England football team ain’t that great, and never has been.

England produce ‘rough and tumblers’, the Stuart Pearce, Terry Butcher, John Terry mould of footballer that gets UK football fans purring at their commitment to the cause and their hard-man image. They’re the blokes who will die for the shirt, who’ll put their head where others wouldn’t put their boot. Unfortunately, they are all too often technically poor. The ‘fancy dan’ Brazilians and pass-master Italians of this world might not win the same fifty-fifties that Scott Parker might, but they win more silverware.

So why can’t England produce players of huge technical skill? Why are the Joe Coles, the Glenn Hoddles and the John Barnes of history unable to make a mark on the big stage?

One answer? Coaching and attitude. During Holland’s ‘total football’ era of the eighties, European countries flooded to adopt the passing methods, the tactical astuteness, the fast-flowing, free-moving styles that have gone on to be re-shaped and adapted by every successful football side since. Think about it.

Which ‘major footballing nation’ stuck to their guns? England. Blood and thunder, guts and glory. That’ll do for us. Pundits, commentators and fans alike bemoan the harsh refereeing styles utilised across Europe, but a more measured approach to how much pain young players are subjected to has an undeniable effect on their development. Time and again young Englishmen are thrown out of academies for being too small, too weak, whilst in Spain and Brazil it is skill, not size, that rules the roost.

A huge and unbridled change in attitude is required. Where Jamie Carragher would scramble the ball from an opponent before booting it into row-Z, Paolo Maldini would take the extra touch and lay it off to a playmaker. The difference is that Carragher would receive the bigger applause.

That said, we’re coming round. Increased exposure to European club football and a higher quality of tactical analysis are slowly pulling English football up by the bootlaces. Tactically astute young managers such as Brendan Rodgers, Michael Laudrup and Paul Lambert are being handed opportunities and are flourishing in an environment where more stoic football once reigned supreme. And the fans can see that.

There are so many things that need to change for English football to put hundreds of years of mediocrity behind it. To say the buck falls with the EPL is short sighted and lazy.