Poll England for the English
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It was as recently as 1992 that Yorkshire Cricket Club relaxed their rule that only people born in Yorkshire could play for the club. Twenty years later, that rule seems like a curious form of ancient tribalism based on the proposition that people from our gene pool are better than people from your gene pool.
The argument that only people born in England can play football for England is a continuation of the same idea which seems to me fundamentally racist.
I think that anybody should be able to choose what country they play for, provided they comply with reasonable qualification rules such as are in place at the moment, including the five years residence one.
It seems ironic that the English people who make sarcastic remarks about Greg Rusedski playing tennis for England, or Kevin Pietersen playing cricket for England, on the grounds that "they are not really English" are often the very people who would trumpet that they are anti-racist.
The argument that only people born in England can play football for England is a continuation of the same idea which seems to me fundamentally racist.
I think that anybody should be able to choose what country they play for, provided they comply with reasonable qualification rules such as are in place at the moment, including the five years residence one.
It seems ironic that the English people who make sarcastic remarks about Greg Rusedski playing tennis for England, or Kevin Pietersen playing cricket for England, on the grounds that "they are not really English" are often the very people who would trumpet that they are anti-racist.
I agree, if you qualify for a passport then you can play for the national team.
[article]Earlier this week Jack Wilshere was criticised for his response to being asked about the possibility of Manchester United’s Belgium-born midfielder Adnan Januzaj playing for England.
“The only people who should play for England are English people,” the Arsenal midfielder said. “If you live in England for five years it doesn’t make you English.”
Gerrard doesn’t share Wilshere’s views over player eligibility for England and would be happy to welcome anyone who qualifies for the national team.
“If players become available through FIFA rules then it’s only right that the FA look into it,” Gerrard said.
“We need to try and gain every advantage we can to try and make the England team as strong as possible.
“To be fair to Jack, he’s given a very patriotic answer; he loves England and I don’t think he’s meant to intentionally disrespect anyone or any other sport.”[/article]
“The only people who should play for England are English people,” the Arsenal midfielder said. “If you live in England for five years it doesn’t make you English.”
Gerrard doesn’t share Wilshere’s views over player eligibility for England and would be happy to welcome anyone who qualifies for the national team.
“If players become available through FIFA rules then it’s only right that the FA look into it,” Gerrard said.
“We need to try and gain every advantage we can to try and make the England team as strong as possible.
“To be fair to Jack, he’s given a very patriotic answer; he loves England and I don’t think he’s meant to intentionally disrespect anyone or any other sport.”[/article]
They only relaxed that rule so they would have people in the team to whom they could say, 'I'm from Yorkshire, me' and generally bore them to tears talking about how great bloody Yorkshire is!
I love red setters!!
I think what actually emerged about Cascarino playing for Ireland was that he literally had no link at all. I'm sure I heard him say that Charlton et al just made up some bollocks about an Irish grandmother who never actually existed.
That's what I remember, anyway.
I bet Mary Decker does.
Benitez:
[article=http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/the-rafael-benitez-column-english-players-for-england-thats-more-complex-than-it-sounds-8875129.html]It was good to see Jack Wilshere talking about nationality this week and how he believes that only English players should play for England. Everyone loves to talk about football and every follower of the game is an armchair manager or player but perhaps sometimes we don’t hear the players’ ideas enough.
They are proud of their profession but some of them are reticent because the media is not always good at putting across the subtlety of what they say. Players wonder what the headlines will look like! So it is good that Wilshere, an intelligent player with ideas about the game, put his points well.
I’m not English, of course, though you know the affection I have for your country, so I’m reluctant to be giving big opinions always on what England should be doing and how they should be working. But I do think we can look at the history of people born outside of England playing for the country. The England white shirt has been worn over the years by players born in over 20 countries outside the United Kingdom. The pattern of those countries seems to reflect the way the British Empire looked but it also shows how young people have been travelling to settle in England from a young age for a very long time.
I was reading about John Barnes first settling in England as a young boy, aged about 12 years. That great goal John scored in the Estadio do Maracana for England in 1984 had a lot of Jamaica in it but Barnes was in no doubt about the country he wanted to play for.
It is more than 30 years since Barnes started playing for English teams and in that time the world has changed a lot. It is a global world we live in now and the mobility of people, settling in new places to find work and bring up children, is getting greater all the time. You can’t stop that.
It means that the idea of nationality has become more complex and the idea of what it means to be Spanish, Italian or English has changed a lot. We are all going through the change and England is not the only place where there has been a little bit of controversy. Diego Costa of Atletico de Madrid has decided he wants to play for Spain, if my old friend Vicente del Bosque selects him, rather than for Brazil, where he was born. There has been a debate about this in Spain. Some people say “OK, great”. Other people say that the world champions only need Spanish players. The situation has been complicated because Costa played for Brazil recently in a friendly game. But though the Costa situation is not resolved yet, on the whole there has been less worry in Spain about whether the international team should be allowed to select him.
The concern about this question is tied to the one about whether foreign players in the Premier League are affecting England’s chances, by reducing the number of players the manager has to choose from. I’ve seen from Italy that the debate has still been continuing very strongly since we last discussed it here in the column, a month ago. Again, I don’t want to be saying “this is right” or “that is right”, so let us deal with a few facts.
The BBC’s State of the Game report caught my eye this week. It showed that English players make up 32.26 per cent of all the minutes of football played in the Premier League so far this season – a figure which is down from 35.43 per cent in 2007-08. But in Spain, Spaniards make up 59 per cent of minutes played in La Liga and Germans make up 50 per cent of minutes played in the Bundesliga.
But does this tell us why the number is low? Figures can show a lot of things, without always finding the right answers. There were more British players in the Premier League in 1994, for example, but England didn’t qualify for the US World Cup that year. The problem finding enough international-quality English players is not a new one, either. I was reading about Sir Walter Winterbottom – the England manager after the Second World War. In 1950, he said: “I have only five players out of 22 to look at in a game.” He was talking about the problem with the numbers of Scottish and Irish players. England won the World Cup 16 years later.
So the facts tell different stories and it is not as simple as “too many foreign players”. It’s the quality of the players, not the number. To know that, just look at the population of Croatia (about four million) and another great “new” football nation, Belgium – 11 million. England has 53 million.
By now, you know my views on how in England it is necessary to work on the coaching aspect and on coaching the coaches and how I think that there are a lot of young players here who have the potential to be great England players, if they are developed. Playing alongside great players from other countries can help. At Liverpool, we had not won a Premier League title for 14 years when I arrived in 2004. We could protect the English players and win nothing or bring in players like Luis Garcia, Pepe Reina, Xabi Alonso, Fernando Torres and have them playing alongside Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher or Glen Johnson. You know it was not a choice to make.
These are some of the numbers and the facts and, as I have said, I want to open the debate on who should play for England and who should play for England’s Premier League clubs. Let us know what you think and let us get the debate going further for next time.
But on the question of nationality, I have two good reasons to say that it is more complex than we might think. I only have to look at my daughters. They were both born in Spain but after almost 10 years on Merseyside think themselves English as much as Spanish.[/article]
[article=http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/the-rafael-benitez-column-english-players-for-england-thats-more-complex-than-it-sounds-8875129.html]It was good to see Jack Wilshere talking about nationality this week and how he believes that only English players should play for England. Everyone loves to talk about football and every follower of the game is an armchair manager or player but perhaps sometimes we don’t hear the players’ ideas enough.
They are proud of their profession but some of them are reticent because the media is not always good at putting across the subtlety of what they say. Players wonder what the headlines will look like! So it is good that Wilshere, an intelligent player with ideas about the game, put his points well.
I’m not English, of course, though you know the affection I have for your country, so I’m reluctant to be giving big opinions always on what England should be doing and how they should be working. But I do think we can look at the history of people born outside of England playing for the country. The England white shirt has been worn over the years by players born in over 20 countries outside the United Kingdom. The pattern of those countries seems to reflect the way the British Empire looked but it also shows how young people have been travelling to settle in England from a young age for a very long time.
I was reading about John Barnes first settling in England as a young boy, aged about 12 years. That great goal John scored in the Estadio do Maracana for England in 1984 had a lot of Jamaica in it but Barnes was in no doubt about the country he wanted to play for.
It is more than 30 years since Barnes started playing for English teams and in that time the world has changed a lot. It is a global world we live in now and the mobility of people, settling in new places to find work and bring up children, is getting greater all the time. You can’t stop that.
It means that the idea of nationality has become more complex and the idea of what it means to be Spanish, Italian or English has changed a lot. We are all going through the change and England is not the only place where there has been a little bit of controversy. Diego Costa of Atletico de Madrid has decided he wants to play for Spain, if my old friend Vicente del Bosque selects him, rather than for Brazil, where he was born. There has been a debate about this in Spain. Some people say “OK, great”. Other people say that the world champions only need Spanish players. The situation has been complicated because Costa played for Brazil recently in a friendly game. But though the Costa situation is not resolved yet, on the whole there has been less worry in Spain about whether the international team should be allowed to select him.
The concern about this question is tied to the one about whether foreign players in the Premier League are affecting England’s chances, by reducing the number of players the manager has to choose from. I’ve seen from Italy that the debate has still been continuing very strongly since we last discussed it here in the column, a month ago. Again, I don’t want to be saying “this is right” or “that is right”, so let us deal with a few facts.
The BBC’s State of the Game report caught my eye this week. It showed that English players make up 32.26 per cent of all the minutes of football played in the Premier League so far this season – a figure which is down from 35.43 per cent in 2007-08. But in Spain, Spaniards make up 59 per cent of minutes played in La Liga and Germans make up 50 per cent of minutes played in the Bundesliga.
But does this tell us why the number is low? Figures can show a lot of things, without always finding the right answers. There were more British players in the Premier League in 1994, for example, but England didn’t qualify for the US World Cup that year. The problem finding enough international-quality English players is not a new one, either. I was reading about Sir Walter Winterbottom – the England manager after the Second World War. In 1950, he said: “I have only five players out of 22 to look at in a game.” He was talking about the problem with the numbers of Scottish and Irish players. England won the World Cup 16 years later.
So the facts tell different stories and it is not as simple as “too many foreign players”. It’s the quality of the players, not the number. To know that, just look at the population of Croatia (about four million) and another great “new” football nation, Belgium – 11 million. England has 53 million.
By now, you know my views on how in England it is necessary to work on the coaching aspect and on coaching the coaches and how I think that there are a lot of young players here who have the potential to be great England players, if they are developed. Playing alongside great players from other countries can help. At Liverpool, we had not won a Premier League title for 14 years when I arrived in 2004. We could protect the English players and win nothing or bring in players like Luis Garcia, Pepe Reina, Xabi Alonso, Fernando Torres and have them playing alongside Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher or Glen Johnson. You know it was not a choice to make.
These are some of the numbers and the facts and, as I have said, I want to open the debate on who should play for England and who should play for England’s Premier League clubs. Let us know what you think and let us get the debate going further for next time.
But on the question of nationality, I have two good reasons to say that it is more complex than we might think. I only have to look at my daughters. They were both born in Spain but after almost 10 years on Merseyside think themselves English as much as Spanish.[/article]
The existing regulations regarding nationality seem to work pretty well although the Republic of Ireland did stretch them too far back then. I agree you can't have players changing from one national side to another at will. As Arsene Wenger said last week, that would lead to international football becoming like the Premier League with bidding wars to sign players.
No, if you've already played for one national team you can't swap.
Hear, hear!
Despite the drag from the bible bashing southern parts (republicans and tea baggers), it still attracts the best (from all fields) to its shores. Many after a few years feel american, thrive and call themselves American. I'd love to see that attitude here.
I think that situation is pretty much replicated here. There are many attracted to the UK of all skills and abilities because it provides opportunity. Just take a look at olympians in sport or scientists in research universities or artists in cultural media as an example.
The current regulations are fair and reasonable it seems to me.
That one isn't down to any nationality bullshit, but because you only have handfuls of people in the entire world who have done similar research to what you need doing. In any case I don't want the FA getting their grubby racist hands upon any of our youth players. That was some good work done by Wilshire.
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