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

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.

http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/1535/b474.jpg

This is amazing - setting a lunatic arbitrary target with no mechanism to reach it. Even more so when the pre-target - semis at Euro 2020 - was only two or three penalties away last summer.

it might be an indicator of how powerless the FA feels with regard to developing the game in England. Dyke's quotes read to me as half "anybody got any ideas?" and half "please help us oh powerful Premier League"

they'll be lucky to even be in the next world cup, seriously. and who's going to take the job after hodgson gets sacked?

They'll qualify comfortably, I don't know why the panic. Much as I like Hodgson, his dampening talk here is even worse than at Liverpool.

NV was it ever thus? Was there really ever a time when the clubs considered England to be a priority?

it is different now though in that, and it's a cliché, there's no way the youth system can have any real emphasis on it in england when even clubs finishing 10th or whatever are richer than most of their european counterparts.

when even clubs finishing 10th or whatever are richer than most of their european counterparts.

Clubs finishing 20th are richer than most of their european counterparts.

i'm sure the FA held a lot more sway over the clubs when Premier League money hadn't happened but i don't know if anybody has written in-depth look at shifts in political power in the English game. the bottom line is that for most of their history the FA and the Football League weren't in significant competition over finances and resources and obv the EPL itself didn't exist

as i understood it most of the recent rule changes re: developing young players have been in favour of the Prem clubs, and the FA has far less control over the development of schoolkids than it did even 20 years ago. "not enough English players in the Prem" is surely a symptom of England's problems more than a substantial cause of them.

it's always about youth development imo

the wealthiest teams in europe all produce far more good players than any epl sides. real madrid are the wealthiest by revenue and most spendthrift yet they still produce enough players to field a champions league team, half of them in england and very few still in madrid.

this sort of third way maoism by dyke is exactly predicated on the complete lack of central planning by epl teams. they are gradually rationalizing their mgmt structures with directors of football etc but in general they still change managers frequently and each of them guts and replenishes the side and has no incentive to prioritize young players.

then at youth level the emphasis on demonstrable, short term success with the youth teams rather than nurturing individual players tends to produce legions of barely competent players with only physical advantages. ajax and bayern are explicit about only trying to get a few players a year, the rest are merely making up the numbers to field a side.

then the reasons why the players are crap -- bayern / barcelona have one clear advantage in that they have second teams in the lower divisions. the 90 minute rule isn't great but football teams are concentrated in the southeast and northwest where most of them have a netherlands sized catchment area.

epl teams spend plenty on their youth academies but coaching in general doesn't seem very good, the number of elite uefa licenses is absurdly small, something like a quarter of the proportion in spain. there's also the cultural chasm between the current epl which requires higher levels of technique than british style football generally does, so loads of ishmael miller / ryan tunnicliffe type dogshit is produced for champo level in order to bring in a continuing stream of revenue for the elite academies.

Graph of playstation ownership per country to thread

the coaching thing is interesting, especially when you look at say the u21s. like psycho followed by gareth southgate, both managers on the way down from failed topflight careers. doesn't really say much about investment in youth. surely at the worst you give this job to a hungry guy who's looking to prove self rather than someone already proven to be rubbish.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2411847/West-Brom-forward-Saido-Berahinos-journey-streets-Burundi-England-Under-21s.html

‘It’s not like here where kids have PS3s and the internet'

http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/west-brom-chairman-blasts-premier-4802779

http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/football/transfer-news/aston-villa-lodge-young-player-2033504

Albion’s biggest gripe is that each Category One youngster has a set ‘price’ of £209,000 (not including add-ons for U-12 to U-16s, not including add-ons for eventual appearances) which Peace feels renders his own club’s academy as a loss-making venture.

“Why are we spending £2.5million to be another club’s academy? We’ve invested in the infrastructure and we’ll see what happens over the next year. But from what we’re seeing so far it’s very disappointing.

“We’ve brought in a whole load of staff, all these facilities and then a club can come along with £200k and say ‘here you go, thank you very much’.

“It’s irritating me because it’s about the big clubs, not about clubs like us. Perhaps £2.5million would be better spent bringing in a player rather than spending it every year on the academy."

I think Southgate has some sensible thoughts along these lines but the positive impact that any U21 coach can have is extremely limited. In any case, by the time they get to U21 level the damage has been done. If the FA are serious about improving the technical quality of English players they need to start much much earlier.

and as i think Nilmar illustrates they need to either wrest control of youth development back from Premier League clubs or, more plausibly, impose much stricter control on the way the elite clubs develop young players

disagree about coaches not being able to have a positive impact on the players. stuart pearce is the guy who stuck david james up front when he was desperate for a goal remember. performances in the summer gave me the impression that they just didn't know what the plan was, and that comes from the coach. not as sold on this 'technically shite' argument as i think i used to be either.

i can see how the current wave of technically accomplished young English footballers might give the lie to that argument

nobody who knew shit about fitba could watch an england youth team game and not notice how risibly shit the basic control of 80% of players is

the rare exceptions tend to come from the few academies where half of the other players and coaching staff are from abroad

they play in tramlines even when not playing 442, everything is vertical or to the wings

this latest thing is more idle dogshit probably, the fa have no significant power over private institutions who can and will and should do what the fuck they want, but it would rather not admit it so continue to dissimulate wrt to their capacities and ~relevance~

Dyke was perfectly happy to enhance his reputation as a straight talking, no-nonsense leader, a bit of a geezer, while taking care to stress he was not offering the Premier League outside for a fight.