England to World: Can We Have Our Ball Back, Please?
Remarkably, Israel have just beaten Russia 2-1 in Tel Aviv. So it’s now quite possible England will sneak into next summer’s European Championships after all, and the last week of handwringing over the quality of England’s footballers will be forgotten and replaced by gibberish about the “golden generation”.
Then we’ll lose on penalty kicks in the Semi-Finals and we get to enjoy another two years of Steve McClaren’s miserable football.
The refusal to learn from history, and instead to blame everyone else for our unending misfortunes, reached perhaps unparalleled heights this week. The “blame the foreigners in the Premiership” game took over the football media; sensible folks like Brian who point out there isn’t much of a correlation between the number of foreigners in a domestic league and that country’s success in international tournaments are blithely ignored.
And Brian’s further point that pitting Micah Richards against better players is surely likely to make him, well, better reminded me of something Nick Hornby wrote before last year’s World Cup in his “England” piece,
The foreign imports have dragged the cream of the English players, sometimes reluctantly, toward something approaching competence. We used to be very game, and very limited (and by “we,” I may be referring to every single inhabitant of the country); we didn’t have to worry about other countries much, because we only played them every couple of years anyway. Now the English players play with or against the best in the world every single week, and they’ve had to learn very quickly just to say in the game, and in the profession.
That fact is behind the hype given to the likes of Steven Gerrard or Wayne Rooney, yet somehow it’s supposed to help to have them playing with and against worse opposition week in and week out?
The post by Little Dotmund at 200%’s blog, The Ten Most Significant Figures In The History Of The England Football Team, reinforces that this myopia is nothing new. Brilliantly, two of the selections are great English managers who never even managed England. No man with the tactical nous of Herbert Chapman or with the maverick genius of Brian Clough has ever been given power by the F.A. Sure, Alf Ramsey won the World Cup — but it was at home, the winning goal wasn’t actually a goal, and we benefited from Pele being kicked out of the tournament. And now we’re getting to relive the Graham Taylor era for a second time, this time with the added joy of McClaren being an amazingly dull nonentity.
In England, we don’t talk about tactical innovation or youth development and bringing in people from other countries who could teach us a thing or two; instead, we talk about kicking out Johnny Foreigner off of our little island to solve our woes. We want to take our ball back, and not let anyone else bloody well play with it.
About the Author
Tom Dunmore is the founder and editor of Pitch Invasion. Follow him @pitchinvasion on Twitter.
Email this author | All posts by Tom Dunmore
You might also like:
|
|
|
|
|
7 Comments
Trackbacks
- Pitch Invasion · Thaksin Shinawatra, Man City and Politics in Thailand
- Pitch Invasion · Foreign Quotas, Could They Happen Legally?
“Then we’ll lose on penalty kicks in the Semi-Finals”
You mean the quarters, surely.
Also, I don’t think anyone in the media or elsewhere is taking the ‘foreigners ruined our footballers’ line seriously.
The blame for England’s current problems lies squarely with Second-Choice Steve and the FA big-wigs who put him in charge. England needs a manager with the balls to drop players who are in the squad purely on the basis of the size of the salary they receive from their club and fail to perform every single freaking time they pull on a white jersey.
Hudsonland, I think you’re right that few people in the media have embraced the idea of a foreign-players quota. But enough prominent windbags in football and politics have been going on about it recently (Sir Alex, Steven Gerrard, Gerry Sutcliffe, Gordon Brown) that it seems worth articulating the reasons to oppose it.
That said, I agree with you about McClaren and have been amazed by the (obviously coordinated) groundswell of support for him among England players, FA types, and legends of bygone days. I don’t think he’s a terrible manager, but what single thing has he done to impress? Even playing Barry in midfield was forced on him by injury, and now it looks like a return to “Can Lampard play with Gerrard?” editorials for the dreary forseeable future.
Israel’s win, of course, means that there’s nothing wrong with English football and we don’t need a period of soul searching and reflection.
Which is, on the whole, bad for the game. Nothing ever changes.
Hudsonland, I agree about the F.A. and second choice Steve. That’s what I was getting at (though wasn’t very clear about) in bringing up Clough — the F.A. have never had the balls to appoint someone who’d actually say what’s what.
Alex, it’s depressing, isn’t it? To know that actually going to Euro 2008 is probably worse for us in the longrun. Rather spoils the fun.
The FA don’t want a man in charge of the playing side of the game in this country because they know he might actually break tradition with simply calling up the bigger names in the game.
If the press hadn’t have hounded down Philipe Scolari in the build-up to Sven’s replacement, the game England play would have been a lot more solid yet attack minded side than it is now but sadly we missed out on that opportunity.
What is clear but yet to be proven is that there is a ‘boy’s’ club at the top of the FA and until a higher power become involved to shake-up the game in England nothing will change.