How the hell does this continue to go on?
Every two-four years we find ourselves being pulverised by media and fan debate over this hopeless football team. Every serious and well constructed opinion on the future of the national game is seemingly dismissed at hand by the men who CAN make a difference, the Football Association. But, as us Liverpool fans know, this is a pathetic money driven and money obsessed organisation who laughably pay the national football team manager extortionate wages to deliver sweet f**k all. The size of the wages being paid out to England manager’s past and present, is indicative of the moronic sensibilities that infest HQ at Wembley. In their minds, only one man can make a difference, the England manager.
Now don’t think for one moment that I am undermining the role of the England manager and that the position is meaningless in the grander scheme of other ill things. Getting the right national team manager in is an important building block in the construction of an excellent football team that can leave a lasting legacy on the national game. It is the manager’s job to implement an identity within the national team, something England have not had for years and years. That manager, as we’ve seen this week (and as we saw during 6 miserable months in the second half of 2010) clearly is NOT Roy Hodgson.
But where does that identity come from? Well, for starters the FA could look no further than Merseyside and Liverpool FC in particular. Here we’ve got a young British manager who’s instinctively knows the setup of the English game having learnt his trade at all levels in the country. Here we’ve got a young British manager who has got Liverpool playing some of the most exhilarating and progressive football seen in a long time who incorporated within that play a plentiful supply of Englishman (and a Welshman) who contribute to such football. Why not use Liverpool as a template in the same way that the Dutch used the Ajax team of the late 60s or the way the Spaniards used the Barcelona side of the past few years? But of course, is that likely to happen? The FA ignored the play Liverpool exhibited in the 70s and 80s when we were winning trophy after trophy – why would they take notice of Liverpool now?
A lack of a wider identity and the lack of a manager who has the guts or the know how to say ‘this is how it will be’ is just a part of the wider problem as there continues to be a massive infrastructure problem. The need to proliferate the numbers of top grade UEFA coaches in England is well documented but still falls on deaf ears. That said the coaching system in place right now still relies on strictness and inflexibility refusing to allow players to express themselves and develop intuition and their maturity. In turn I’m sure that leads to a football culture in England that reflects the cerebral qualities of an ITV2 documentary.
In contrast you look at World Cup winning nations of the past, the likes of Spain, Italy and France, and they are jammed pack of mature, deep, intelligent and thoughtful individuals – players who have clearly been given the chance in their youth to think for themselves rather than being told to stick to a strict and rigid training regime (this ‘strict and rigid regime’ is not an attempt to instil attractive football, but rather long ball, functional and aimless play), offering no chance for a young player to blossom. Laurent Blanc, Didier Deschamps, Andrea Pirlo, Xavi Hernandez – they read and played like a footballing Mensa. Two of those, Blanc, Deschamps, have gone on to become excellent managers in their own right. Such cranial ineptness has infested the managerial sphere, where the likes of Sam Allardyce, Tony Pulis and Steve Bruce are praised for their remedial, insipid and inexpressive style of football. But of course, these guys do ‘outstanding’ jobs for doing unremarkable feats as keeping average teams in the top tier so in that respect we should praise them. And yet, the three of them have done nothing to merit even a footnote in the annals of English footballing history. Perhaps if the FA, the English media and even the English fans would stop rewarding such mediocrity, take a step back and approach the development of the national team in a holistic and definite manner then England could have a starting point in eradicating their joke status on the world stage and actually become decent.
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