England Reap What The FA Have Sown
Thursday, November 29th, 2007 by Stuart Stratford
The hunt for a new England Head Coach has polarised the debate about the number of foreign players in the Premier League. The argument deflects attention away from the real issue; the paucity of outstanding English managers. Only seven of the top flight has Englishmen at the helm. None of them are genuine contenders for the England job, even before they rule themselves out. None have a trophy cabinet in which the shelves buckle under the silverware they have won.
The FA has promised to conduct a ‘Root and Branch’ review of the coaching methodologies from schoolchildren upwards. Yet they fail to admit their part in the current state of English football. What is being reaped now was sown two decades ago. The Golden Generation is the biggest misnomer there has been in the game within these shores. The crop was raised by coaches devouring the FA’s Coaching Manuals that espoused the most efficient way to score a goal was with four passes. Long ball merchants may well have been almost eradicated from the top flight but the apostles were still active through to 1998 when Hughes retired, his philosophy subjected to derision and scorn.
It permeates the game still. The emphasis on moving the ball quickly left little time for personal skills to be developed hence their scarcity amongst the English. A generation lost thanks to misguided thoughts. The generation now in their prime at the Academies are the first to be trained to ‘love’ the ball, treat it as their best friend rather than their enemy. Arsenal lead the way with the passing and movement of the first team drilled into the youngsters at the lowest professional rung at the club. It will be four years before they are ready to move into regular starting positions wherever they make the grade. At least they will be imbued with good habits.
Complacency is not just the preserve of the administrators; the players are as naïve and insular. Michael Owen’s ludicrous judgement that none of the Croatia team were good enough to play for England beggared belief, especially as they had taken six points from the two matches. David James followed that up in his column in The Observer this past weekend, opining that neither Sir Alex Ferguson nor Arsene Wenger should be asked for their views on the England managers’ position as they were part of the problem, either withdrawing players from squads with dubious injuries or not picking Englishmen for their teams. With that sort of thinking in the game being prevalent, the doldrums in which English football finds itself may be deeper than first thought.
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