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

i wasn't trying to get off subject asking about gerrard btw, he just seems the figure head of the 'control the ball' basics nonsense that pundits are focussing in on when they should have a list like noodle's.

a lot of English fans don't like to watch teams holding onto the ball and not getting it forward at the first opportunity

is this true? or is it only true because teams don't hold on to the ball very well and fans associate it with problems and potential failure?

no other country in the world afaik has over 100 full-time professional clubs

i don't see how this is correlated with us having distinctly LESS coaches than other countries and less coaches who know what they are doing - surely these places should be the breeding ground for those who go out into the community, invite to spend a week w/ their local u10s or something etc.

i... think so? Focusing on the faults of the top end players isn't a true reflection of the system- particularly as many of those players really only excel, it seems to me at times, through exceptional prowess at things that can't really be attributed to coaching or technical training- maybe that's unfair, to idk lampard and ferdinand, and i'm overfocusing on gerrard myself.

xp- re: slow build up- english football fans are addicted to drama, and they demand it from their players afaict

yeah but otoh stoke and west ham are the most boring teams in the league for a reason and west ham were losing paying fans by the ton last season as they got more bigsamish

West Ham are one of those clubs with an alleged history of playing cultured football. i think there's a difference between fans who attend regularly, are paying silly money for a ticket and therefore wanna be entertained to some extent and fans who rarely attend, predominantly care about the result and probably care less about the quality of the football that achieves it. but i can imagine the good citizens of Stoke enjoying nothing more than 90 minutes of gladiatorial savagery once a fortnight.

the thing about the ridiculous number of pro clubs is that there's a much larger pool of employment for effective but low-skilled journeyman, and the development staff at a lot of those clubs are probably much more interested in finding lads who are gonna be the next lumpen stopper/target man than watching slight 10 year-olds fannying around trying to be Messi. something about having clubs so far down the tiers where winning is so essential has a distorting effect on our game i think.

i can understand that

I think that's a really good point. And loath as I am to pin anything on the influx of foreigners, it's undoubtedly true that they're filling the roles where you do have a bit of licence to play unparalysed by fear.

a lot of English fans don't like to watch teams holding onto the ball and not getting it forward at the first opportunity

Undoubtedly true. George Graham's Arsenal side post 91 earned the 'boring Arsenal' tag for exactly this reason, despite winning the Cup Winner's Cup and the FA/League Cup double in the process.

wait are you making it seem like that arsenal side were bastions of possession football?

They concentrated on defence and holding onto the ball, with Ian Wright as the sole front man, and mainly had 1-0 wins. In fact, the season they won the title the second goal vs Liverpool came right at the end because attacking was even by then becoming 'not the Arsenal way'. And it was definitely unpopular, as the terrace chants testify and is still an accusation.

xpost I recall Graham's Arsenal being a compress the game at the halfway line - pass back to the keeper - ping it forward to Ian Wright - score a goal and defend like the very devil kind of boring rather than a "ooh look at that tedious tiki taka" kind of boring.

I am not sure about the lower leagues being geared to producing garden-variety cloggers: there's certainly some of that but it seems to me the lower leagues produce quite a lot of tidy-but-not-inspired fit blokes. The problem English football has, it seems to me, is not generating enough pretty competent players but in generating ten or so really effing brilliant ones and a further thirty bloody good ones behind them. I don't think you can blame the lower division clubs for that - as soon as anyone begins to look like they might be talented they get spirited away to the swamps of the Premiership youth teams anyway.

Having said that, you definitely get some clubs in Leagues One and Two whose whole philosophy around a team full of big fit lads, but it's by no means all.

Hmm. I think these are, to a degree, issues of semantics. Holding the ball, stifling the midfield are definitely part of the same thing. The Borussia Dortmund side that knocked Man U out of the European Cup in 96/97 played a choking game which saw them badly criticised in the English press and to my mind Paul Lambert ran that show - but he always maintained he did it after seeing Dunga do it to great effect for the Brazilian national side.

a lot of English fans don't like to watch teams holding onto the ball and not getting it forward at the first opportunity

It's hard not to be impatient at games. I like the ball-on-the-deck passing game as much as the next guy but sometimes you just need some cunt to put a ball in the box.
I prefer to see 3-7 passes with pace and directness despite it often breaking down to watching Barca/Spain fuck around for 40 passes 40 yards from goal. I prefer both to the (perceived but not always true) Stoke/Big Sam/Crazy Gang model of getting the ball into oppo territory asap by any means possible, preferably without the use of such luxuries as midfielders.

Holding the ball, stifling the midfield are definitely part of the same thing.

maybe its the waitrose shopper in me but these are two totally different things! they are only connected in something like neanderthal english football where the likes of cesc or alonso or scholes started passing sideways and the opposition midfield got confused and angry

Paul Lambert's career trajectory is the weirdest thing; but it's notable that each of his four clubs reached its modern peak with him in the side.

absolutely bored blue in the face by the amount of total shite cliché-mongering about "grassroots" and "teaching a kid to keep the ball" etc etc being bandied about by clueless morons lately. it's like there are 5/6 really facile ideas of what good development is and now every talking head is wheeling them out gormlessly.

Just because a lot of clueless morons are jumping on the bandwagon doesn't make it not true. But there are other things that are poor in English football - the first touch of a lot of young English players just isn't that good. And anyone who's seen an England team basically running up and down in straight lines will know they aren't really taught about movement off the ball properly.

If there wasn't a growing awareness of this sort of stuff then Liverpool wouldn't have taken a punt on Brendan Rodgers.

i think there's a world of difference between tikitaka and graham's arsenal passing it back to seaman all game, just as there's a world of difference between direct football as practiced by eg man utd '99 rampaging on the counter attack down the wings and 'lump it' big sam tactics.

I prefer to see 3-7 passes with pace and directness

this is why Dortmund are so good to watch. Poor Shinji :(

as i said before it's not just a case of "why can't we play like Barca?"

there's a lot of points inbetween hoof and run and hold the ball in your own half for 89 minutes a match, but i think a lot of the skill deficiencies in training very young kids and selecting kids for club's youth programmes are a result of an adherence to playing "exciting", direct football without fully understanding how that comes about. we've had lightning quick wingers who can't cross a ball since at least the 70s, we've had a surfeit of "good" players who can't retain possession in an advanced position for at least as long.

in other words it mightn't be the worst thing in the world to train 8 year-olds to play tiki-taka even if you've no intention of playing that way at adult level. train kids to play like adults and by the time they're at professional level they're likely v. limited in their actual skill sets. yes, we produce some good players, but it's hard to think of many international class Englanders over the last 3 decades whose game didn't centre on their physicality, whether that be speed or stamina.

Well of course. We can keep the national identity of a fast pace, ruthless game. But we should be trying to make it so we play that style with guys who pick the right pass as opposed to the lumped gamble and can understand the tactics of why they do things on and off the ball. Germany aren't playing tiki-taka, they are playing German football. They are just playing German football extremely well.

mine was an xpost to the 3-7 passes bit. to noodle i say, wasn't there a big todo (esp when southgate got called up) about kids on the whole preferring to play passing, less competitive games and its the parents/coaches who choose to do the other, results based game? and yeah it would make a hell of a difference if we changed the idea of what we want from dropping kids off on a sunday morning to learn something together, to think about what they are doing etc. instead of just jumping into each other and big means good and thats cool because maybe one of those kids will possibly maybe be looked at and then forgotten again by their local league 1 side

i'd love to see an article where someone asks idk the england team for an honest assessment of their coach at randomvillage terriors u9s and if they had any impact on them or

ebjt: yeah my coach loved me because i could kick the shit out of the smaller kids. there was this one kid we played from [rival town team] who could go round 6 kids and score everytime! my coach told me to batter 'em and i did and we won the league easily after that.

etc.

I never took you as an enforcer type a hoy hoy.

ust because a lot of clueless morons are jumping on the bandwagon doesn't make it not true. But there are other things that are poor in English football - the first touch of a lot of young English players just isn't that good. And anyone who's seen an England team basically running up and down in straight lines will know they aren't really taught about movement off the ball properly.

If there wasn't a growing awareness of this sort of stuff then Liverpool wouldn't have taken a punt on Brendan Rodgers.

don't doubt it's true, to an extent, but it's just repeated wisdom at this point, there must be deeper insight, English football has been in the same cycle of discourse for 3/4 years.

I also agree with darragh, England did have success in the CL and although, yes, there were foreign players involved, were they really of the Xavi/Iniesta variety? Was that success based on a possession game?

The first prolonged burst of English success in the European Cup is really interesting to me because it's such an outlier. The national team was awful, the great world players were nearly all in Italy or wherever, there were no particularly innovative methods involved (I don't think), and when English clubs reappeared it was all gone. Was it all just down to The Boot Room plus one genius, plus who knows how Villa won it? It's a pity that Everton side never got a chance to have a go.

yah but each of those teams to make it to the final had a alonso, cesc, scholes, essien at the heart- only last year's chelsea team eshewed possession football all together.

xpost obv

Essien is hardly a shining example of a possession footballer. NB I love Essien.

ok yeah i started typing that went 'oh yuh deco hadnt turned up yet' and hoped noone noticed

xenophobia, arrogance, distrust of anything that is perceived to require a degree of thought and careful planning (eg. man-marking v zonal defending), etc etc. tide seems to be turning i suppose but we'll see.

Neville told The Times: ‘We’ve got to be careful. When people talk about the DNA of English football, we’ve got one: we work hard, we’re organised, structured, resilient, hard to beat. Not bad qualities.

'Go back over the last 20 years — last year Italy, even though you can argue they performed better than us, didn’t beat us; Portugal in 2004 and 2006 didn’t beat us; 1998, Argentina, we were down to ten men for 70-odd minutes and they didn’t beat us; in 1996, Germany didn’t beat us. So let’s not give away what we’re good at.

'People say we don’t have a DNA? Give me a break. We have a DNA as a country — British Standards, the British legal system, solidity, structure, organisation, that never-say-die spirit.

'We’re not arrogant, we’re the first to take the mickey out of ourselves and be down on ourselves. We’re trying to take the best of that and add a higher level of flair and technical ability.'

he's kinda otm

British Standards?

hes a retard

the DNA of English football, we’ve got one............People say we don’t have a DNA? Give me a break. We have a DNA as a country — British Standards, the British legal system, solidity, structure, organisation, that never-say-die spirit

football, country

he has a point that such values are for better or worse entrenched in coaching. sure, 'british standards' is self-aggrandising bullshit but he's absolutely correct to work with the prevailing discourse and amend it through increments of technical improvement rather than seek to take it apart at a stroke

ya but you can't really separate one from the other, the torrent of imbecilic drivel surrounding that dog-eared kernel of truth is exactly why any hope of integration is likely to remain empty guff forever

No

Hes incorrect that that numbing mishmash of channel dave advertising level regalia cuntishness is even accurate, he's incorrect that it translates to a footballing identity, he's incorrect that it is even to be consolidated upon even if it did, he's incorrect to make this embarrassment of a diatribe public

Seems a fair diagnosis. England only ever really lose to a combination of top organisation and top technique - since they're invariably well-organised themselves, the skill gap always looks horrendous. But otherwise England usually at least hold their own when the opposition only has one of these qualities.

Spirit is fair too - nevermind doggedness, in the two most traumatic defeats of the past decade (Croatia 2007, Germany 2010) England managed a frankly stupid two-goal comeback. See the recent Brazil game too. That sort of thing is fucking terrifying to anybody even slightly flaky.

But ultimately you can't get over poor technique.

siding with klata on this one, really. dunno if that means i've revoked my immunity

...or gained it

immunity from?

the eternal zinging flame

Eh, is that what siding with me gets you? :o( Time for ILF glee club.

the spirit of british fair play immunizes all who sail under her ensign

As long as you post hard and never say die you'll be fine

Well you won't be, but you'll probably make the quarter-finals.