England's Shame - Too Little Training
| 14:08 UK time, Friday, 23 November 2007
Lots of bitterness and anger in England following the soccer team's ingnominious ejection from the Euro 2008 contest.
In the desperate search for excuses, the number of foreign players in the top league, the Premiership, is blamed.
The team over which my 9-year-old son expends far too much emotion, Arsenal, who are currently top of the league, regularly put out a team with no English players at all.
The theory runs that because English players get less chance to compete at the highest levels, their skills and standards can't rise far enough to make them internationally competitive when they come together as the national team.
So there are calls for some kind of cap on the number of non-English players in Premiership teams.
But surely the need is for higher standards, not lower? It's hard to see how kicking out better players would achieve that.
The problem is lack of training. The sport's governing body, the Football Association, has been dithering over spending $100m on a training academy where young talent would be nurtured. They still haven't made a to invest.
But a country of 60m people should have six or seven such academies, in my view, and some of the huge amount of money in the sport should be raised for that, either voluntarily or in the form of a levy on $300,000-a-week players and wealthy clubs.
Blaming foreigners for our problems may be a British trait with a long tradition.
But it's never done any good.
Comments
The England team are individuals and not a team and that is why they never win anything. They are spoilt self centered players who wont work as a unit like the Russians did against England.
The new manager needs to drop these players and create a team spirit.