Tragic Football Stories - Let us Kick Around the misshapen Jabulani that is English football right here

so bbc runs yet another article about the dude who backed ashley young at watford when everyone said he'd never make it.

"When he got to 15 or 16 there was a school of thought at Watford that he wasn't big enough, strong enough or quick enough to make a professional footballer. I felt I knew him best from working with him and thought he had bags and bags of ability. I really felt there was something there and I think you have got to trust the people who work with the players more than anyone else.

"I'm not one of those that believes you have to be six-feet plus to be a good footballer. I just saw a fantastic footballer and luckily they listened to my opinion about Ashley and kept him there.

okay ashley young is not leo messi, but like, you read this and kinda think how many ashley youngs are getting turfed out at 15/16 in england? i mean there are tons of great players who aren't big...it's not rugby.

isn't he p quick/big now?

he's still tiny but is very quick.

Who's the Watford guy? Not Graham Taylor?

http://forward-football.net/Features/chris-cummins/

Can anyone think of a good centre back who wasn't/isn't particularly tall or physically imposing?

i always think puyol is tiny and his hair is half his height, dunno if that counts?

Bobby Moore

Think there must have been plenty of small quick dude/tall jumpy dude combos throughout football history

are you just looking for english centre backs? roberto ayala if not.

ok i lied Moore was taller than he looks

Cannavaro

Yeah Puyol seems tiny to me too. Wiki says he's 5'10".

x-posts. Any nationality really. Just trying to think of 'unlikely' CBs. Read somewhere that Jay Spearing started out as a CB, and the Ashley Young thing got me thinking.

Baresi wasn't the tallest

'The greatest full-backs of all time' seems to be the answer here

ivan cordoba

anthony gardner

Three Lions of Africa, examining England's World Cup failure in South Africa, will be broadcast at 1930 BST on Tuesday, 28 June. Former Football Association executive director David Davies will present the programme and host a studio discussion immediately afterwards.

a) what a fucking lame title
b) didn't lineker already do this programme six months ago?

hey blueski

i. Yeah
ii. Yeah but can't be overstressed innit

''One mistake and you could be absolutely slaughtered,'' Carragher told BBC Radio 5 live. ''At your club, you know you will not be criticised as much and perhaps three days later there will be another game.

''With England, it could be months before you have another fixture. There is a fear at times when playing for England.''

He added: ''The intensity of the press does get to the players. Sometimes I think players would prefer the press guy to think they had played well, rather than the manager.''

Carragher also claimed the players were bored in South Africa where they spent most of their day in a hotel, saying: ''You stay in a hotel all day but you are at a World Cup for a long time and should be able to experience different things.

''I wouldn't want players holed up. Take away the boredom, embrace the country we are in more. You never see anything.''

http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story/_/id/930750/jamie-carragher:-england-suffer-from-fear-factor?cc=5901

Did Josh McEachran play at all in this tournament? Was he even in the squad? Looks a better prospect than anyone except Wilshere.

So still a chance Scotland can nick him then?

don't make any mistakes, pro tip. You're playing slovakia and algeria.

" One mistake and the ref could take action, if a limb is severed he might even book you. It's not like at home, where they understand that, as an England international, you've already proven yourself enough and ought to be supported in your half-arsed efforts"

See, I think this is an interesting admission because I have always surmised that this is England's weakness; a certain timidity born of the disconnect between England's self-image and how good (or poor) they actually are then magnified by a relentless press. It's a terrible timidity, too. Just look at the difference in style of play in '10 between the Germans and the English.

knowing how good you are is a pretty important part of preparing correctly, i don't know how much leeway i'd give there.

And they rarely manage expectations going into the things. Next time, let's have wazza saying 'just happy to get out of the group, when you look at the players we have you've got to be realistic havent you'

yeah they completely contribute to their own stupid hype, but really if we can't find 23 professional footballers who can deal with the pressure of playing in a World Cup then maybe we shd give up and stick to darts or something

Imagine it without the hype though, it wouldn't be very entertaining.

i don't know the Scots always seemed to enjoy themselves

Managing expectations would be a good thing but also telling them (and the English collectively) to just go for it; you're not as good as you think you are but thinking that you're hot shit when you're not actually makes you play worse. It's okay to try and hold onto a 3-0 lead but England have a tendency to try and hold onto 1-0 leads for 60+ minutes which is psychological madness.

yeah well they're like us, just happy to be there

Why isn't this a problem in English rugby or cricket so much?

Is it because the English expectations in those sports are more democratic and more reasonable?

supporting Scotland is no fun

xp to mw

I agree, yeah. The most common complaint against england in a tournament is their sudden and disastrous attempts to become italians.

in the case of cricket: because they learnt from years of being terrible and made some of the infrastructural changes necessary to improve. also no actual Englishes in the team.

Rugby also seems to give more of a shit about improving the national game but in England that goes in cycles plus they all use horrible business-speak so fuck em

xp to mw again it's cos you're the only country that plays them tbh

there is little incentive or will for the English FA to try to improve the game as a whole because the balance of power is massively in favour of the clubs who are only interested in the sport as a profitable spectacle - there isn't that much money in international football. or interest: i suspect like the majority of fans (probably the vast majority of fans north of the Watford Gap) i care way more about my club than i do about the vicissitudes of Lol England

is their sudden and disastrous attempts to become italians.

Thank you, thank you, thank you... Exactly what I was thinking after I posted that. I hate Italian f-ball enough already but at least they know how to play that way.

again it's cos you're the only country that plays them tbh

US soccer (at least the men's team) has its own issues in terms of technique and in terms of tactics but at least we play with great heart. Maybe it's because for many years that's pretty much all we had.

i care way more about my club than i do about the vicissitudes of Lol England

I've heard that before and wondered if it was a better reflection of English regional factionalism or just a cop-out since England haven't shone in some while. What's the RW on the FA, that Liverpool and Man U and whomever are there real favorites/bosses?

It's telling of English insularity that for years they didn't even bother to compete in the WC.

preferring club to country is fairly common in followers of association football, and has little to do with regionalism, seeing as a club's greatest rivals are generally from the same city/region.

it's not so much English insularity as the class-riddledness of the administration at the time and the FA's general historical uselessness.

Not caring much about England isn't cos they're crap I think, or not in the way you mean. It's a combo of not being particularly nationalistic (for me: I'd guess this varies a lot but in broad sweeping terms the closer to London you live the more likely you seem to be to care about England as a concept) plus the national side being full of players you spend a lot of the season hating or laughing at plus the annoyance of the public/pundits losing any sense of proportion or logic or knowledge of football when discussing England plus your club tends to be your first proper introduction to football, yr first love as it were plus yr club plays 5 times as many games in a season as the national team plus god knows what else tbh maybe that's all of it

It seems more about supporting England being totally free of consequences. So ludicrous hype, violent mood swings, burning them in effigy, etc. it's a free go at doing all that fun stuff. Y'know, why wouldn't you?

I don't know really though. I used to think it was all serious. Ex-players seem to be the only folk who really care though.

I guess that's also like Americans not being ardent supporters of our olympic basketball team or our baseball team in the world cup

I think I would be a much bigger supporter of the England national team if half of them weren't adulterers and in want to be put in jail for GBH. I have no problem with supporting players from my team's rivals or players that get heat on the field - but when they have proof that they are genuine dickheads like most of the england team, whether on the pitch or when fucking another players wife or having his boys jump a dj for not playing his song or keeping the prostitution trade afloat etc. etc.

ugh

what I find interesting and not often discussed is the decline in the english team in the last decade or so. like they haven't been consistently this shit. under hoddle they were quite good, at least they went out to argentina fighting and gave it a real lash. same at euro 96 under venables. when did the current rot set in, whereby they are just insipid and boring and shit? to my mind it was prob wc 2006, when they just limped through every game then lost to portugal. that's sort of how they've been ever since.

You missed the fact that they didn't qualify for USA 94

england didn't qualify in what, 74, 82, 86, 94 and 08 - maybe we should be looking at why they were SO GOOD in between the normal state of affairs?

lol xpost

yeah fair enough, but they were still at least able to challenge and look somewhat convincing for about a decade. why was that team better? you can't deny in, eg 1998 their exit was a massively diff thing to last year, or even in euro 2004. wc 2002 to some extent as well. people didn't feel as enraged by the exits then cos you could say they played to their potential.

i still maintain for all the talk of the players being deficient, that team is NO WAY as bad as they played in last year's wc.