Another spot on post. It's crazy how obvious it is to people who have a clue about football, how in the hell do the journalists and the FA (by and large) overlook it? Yes there are token comments about youth football but the majority of the time you hear "there are too many foreigners in the PL". There's an article (in the daily mail admittedly) where the journalist tries using Sunderland as an example of why the england under 21s fail (doubt anyone will want to read it but its here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/articl ... amuel.html anyway).worthing_gooner wrote:Agree on all the comments made on grass roots football. I used to coach an Under 12 team up in South London, tried to allow the players freedom to go and express themselves on the pitch without having to worry too much about the result. Trouble is, some of the parents would turn up screaming at their kid.
One time, we had quite a skillfull tricky lad, had a lot of potential, but I remember one match he tried a turn back through the opposition player's legs and lost the ball, the oppo went and scored. One of the parents went absolutely mental at him for "costing us the points"... seriously? Who gives a fuck about points at that age? The kid tried something. Imagine if a young Messi was playing over here, every time he tried something they'd shout at him to play it safe and not try anything stupid. Any flair or technical ability a player has is coached out of him before he's even hit his teenage years, through fear of losing a match and pissing someone off as much as anything.
Trouble is, as usual the FA come out and blame Premier League clubs and foreign imports and all that. They need to look a lot closer to home.
Also can't tell you how strongly I agree with the smaller pitch thing. No young player should ever be playing on a full size pitch. Pitches should gradually increase in size as the player goes up the age groups, but by starting with smaller more compact pitches, they learn the crucial skills of touch, vision, technique and awareness, which (not coincidentally) happen to be the very skills English players lack.
Until youth football coaching and emphasis changes here, we will have the same problems over and over with our national sides.
Blaming a club (as an example, so he's basically blaming all clubs) for bringing in foreign players is totally missing the point. It is actually much, much easier for Sunderland to sign up a 13/14/ 15 year old from Durham or Arsenal to sign a 13/ 14/ 15 year old from Islington than it is for either to go and source a Belgian youngster and bring him over. The clubs would take on English youths and bring them through if they were good enough. The trouble is that the Belgian/ Dutch/ German/ Spanish etc kids at that age tend to be considerably more developed technically than their English counterparts and when trying to sign a player that could make the breakthrough to your first team after receiving top class coaching for a few years it makes a lot more sense to go for the kid that has the basics, the rest of it you can develop with coaching but if you don't have a first touch or can't pass a ball at 14/15 there's very little hope for you.
We need to work on making sure that kids develop enough technically at a young age so that clubs can take them on, the only thing I'd say that some clubs do which I don't agree with is taking kids on too young, one of me lasses kids teammates (who is also 10 years old) was snapped up by Man City last season, they gave his dad a job and a house to get around some rule about the radius you can take the kids from and, for me, that's far too early to be moving them into the cut throat world of trying to make it at a club, these kids might get the coaching they need but they don't get the schooling (meaning that if you're in the vast majority that don't make it you're pretty much on the scrap heap) and they don't get the chance to be kids.
