WHILE England’s leading youngsters are splashing on the Factor 10 sun cream and enjoying their holidays, four Norwegians played for their country in Albania on Friday in a World Cup qualifier and yet were in Israel yesterday ready to fight for the cause.
Havard Nordtveit, Valon Berisha, Joshua King and Marcus Henriksen were called up to play for Norway’s Under-21s.
In Nordtveit’s case he even played against England, coming on as a late substitute as the Scandinavians stuffed us.
Contrast that with our approach as player after eligible player made themselves ineligible due to a variety of differing reasons. Some would even have claimed an ‘injury’. Yep, don’t laugh.
Stuart Pearce has tried for years to change this mentality and yet so far he has had little success.
His belief is that our long-term good as a footballing nation will be best served by insisting our leading youngsters play in big tournament football, which is so different to the weekly grind of the domestic league.
/QUOTE]
John Barnes believes English football is stuck in the Dark Ages and would have struggled at the Under-21 European Championships even with the players they were denied.
The Young Lions headed to Israel among the favourites after a run of nine successive wins, but became the first team to exit the competition following defeats to Italy and Norway.
A key issue for Stuart Pearce's side has been the string of high-profile players made unavailable, with eligible players like Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Phil Jones and Danny Welbeck instead linking up with the senior side.
However, former England international Barnes does not believe their absence is behind the Young Lions' failure, insisting the issues run deeper than that.
"We are not even producing enough players for the senior side, never mind the Under-21s," he told talkSPORT.
"The way we're talking you would think we have Under-21 superstars who are being plucked away from the Under-21s and if they played they would win the Under-21 championship.
"If we played our best players from the Under-21s, I still don't think we would be good enough to win the Under-21 championship. The players aren't there. They are not good enough.
"We still like this old British mentality of up-and-at them, get stuck in, because we are not comfortable keeping the ball if it is seemingly going nowhere.
"Spain don't keep the ball just for the sake of it, but in England we have this attitude that, if you are keeping the ball for 20 passes without getting over the halfway line, they are doing it for no reason. We have to change our philosophy and our mentality."
Aware of the need for progress, the Football Association opened St George's Park training complex last year - a structure seen as key to the future of English football.
"St George's Park and the infrastructure and the money they have spent has nothing to do with addressing the problem," Barnes said. "It has to do with the philosophy.
"You don't need a St George's Park to change the philosophy, you can do that in an open park.
"It is the culture we have to change, nothing to do with spending £50million on a structure."
Barnes is not the first high-profile figure to hit out at the English game over the course of the Under-21 Championships.
Former England managers Glenn Hoddle, Graham Taylor and Steve McClaren have all expressed their concerns, while former defender Sol Campbell feels certain young stars have approached tournaments with an unhealthy sense of entitlement before they have achieved anything in the game.
Manchester United defender Rio Ferdinand, who won 81 caps, has also raised concerns about the state of the English game.
"It starts way down the chain," he posted on Twitter.
"For me u should b able to pluck an u18s player out n put him into the 1st team n not have to school him tactically,just school on opposition.
"Would not happen now at all for us,in contrast if Spain or Germany threw a u18 in he would know his role as these countries have an identity."
BBC Sport's Neil Johnston reports: "Stuart Pearce keeps to his pre-match promise to give valuable experience to his younger players. Liverpool's Andre Wisdom captains the England side while Middlesbrough's Jason Steele takes over from Jack Butland in goal.
"Pearce also turns to Southampton's Nathaniel Clyne, Leeds United's Tom Lees, Chelsea's Josh McEachran, Liverpool's Jonjo Shelvey and Sunderland's Connor Wickham."
Has Wisdom played throughout the tournament or just this game?
Is it odd that Henderson isn't playing? Isn't he usually the captain for them?
Meaningless last group game. Think Pearce wanted to give those who've yet to feature game time/experience. The likes of Wisdom, Lees, McEachran and Steele were basically substitutes/bench warmers.
But England Were Never Any Good...
Everybody is queuing up to discuss the root cause of England's malaise at senior and Under-21 level but they're ignoring something massive: We were never any good.
Last Updated: 10/06/13 at 10:02 Post Comment
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England's Under-21 team got in some useful practice at being outplayed and eliminated early in a European tournament this weekend. It will surely stand them in good stead for when some of them play in the senior side.
As is de rigueur on such occasions, the English football cognoscenti of ex-managers, ex-players and journalists with little else to do at the moment, all went into full 'something must be done' hand-wringing mode about the poor performance of this England side, just as it had recently done about Roy Hodgson's team.
The problem with such post-England defeat blarting is that so much of it is based on the idea that England were once really good and that the past was somehow better than the present. This has always happened but it's never been true.
It's no use Graham Taylor saying: "I think we have all seen this coming. We have got this tremendous amount of money that has now come into football. It means the top four or five clubs are not looking for the best players in England, but the best players in the world because they can afford to buy them."
Ah yes because when this wasn't the case, such as when you, Graham Taylor, were England manager, England were still no better than just alright and often downright poor. You won nothing, you were never near winning anything, yet you had an entire league of Englishmen to choose from.
Equally, it's no use FA honcho David Bernstein saying there is a 'desperate' need to increase the amount of English players in the Premier League. In the 1970s, when the only foreign imports into our leagues came from Scotland or Wales or the Irelands, England failed to qualify for anything for 12 years. Lack of players to choose from might look like the problem but any cursory knowledge of history proves it is otherwise.
It's no use Sol Campbell, another England stalwart who never came close to winning anything internationally, saying:
"With the Under-21s and football in general in England I honestly feel that the quality has gone down."
Gone down compared to when, Sol? Because when you played ten times for the U-21s between 1994 and 1996, you didn't even qualify for the tournament. At least this current crop managed to do that.
But there's the problem, the past is always better than the present, isn't it? Time and again we hear players talking about what it was like 'in my day' as though their day had delivered anything other than the same degree of failure.
It's no use Phil Neville, a man of great international pedigree but absolutely never near ever winning anything with England, saying: "My biggest learning was between 18 and 21. I don't see the lads now getting the chance until they are 21, so they've missed out on three years' football. The biggest thing is to get the players playing regularly."
This might sound eminently sensible, except that when this wasn't the case, when most sides were full of Englishmen of all ages, England were still either just alright or pretty poor. Phil isn't stupid, he must know this, so why is he saying it?
I know I'm repeating myself here but it needs to be asserted loud and often that we have not fallen from the lofty peak of yesteryear. We've not gone backwards due to English kids being excluded or slowed down by overseas talent; by and large we've remained in the same bracket of quality and achievement throughout every post-war era.
But to the ex-pro or the old journo it seems the past was always a better time. In their day England were world beaters. Don't you remember that? Back when it wasn't now.
Here's the truth: England has never been a very good football team for more than the occasional game both pre and post-1966. Our World Cup victory can be seen as a nothing but a short six-game blip in a long history of mediocrity and we even needed a dodgy goal to win that.
All the ex-pros have no solutions to offer because they were part of the problem too. They might want to project their time as somehow superior but they all lost. They all left the stadiums of the world with heads down, a defeat in their guts. And yet they always seem to think they've spotted where we are going wrong, just as when they were players, ex-pros knew where they were going wrong. Everyone has always known where we're going wrong, but still, we go wrong. This must obviously be because they don't really know anything and they never have.
People have always wanted to know who is to blame for England. Variously across the decades it's been the English manager, the foreign manager, the coaching, the pitches, the tactics, the weather, the foreigners, injuries, fitness, our schools, our kids, our parents, our popular culture, our drink culture. Everything has had a finger pointed in its direction.
But the fact is, while our culture, society and our football has changed a lot in the last 60 years and all the scapegoats have been addressed in one way or another, England's results haven't really changed much. While other countries have periods of success and dominance, England never does. We're resolutely unexceptional. Not really bad, never really good.
It is this fact that undermines every single critic who points to any changes in modern football as the problem. Only if England had ever been truly great could we point to changes from those halcyon days as the reasons for our fall from grace. To hear ex-managers and ex-players complaining that things ain't what they used to be requires a total mind wipe and the construction of an alternate reality where Carlton Palmer held the World Cup aloft and Phil Neville didn't clumsily hack Viorel Moldovan down to concede a tournament-eliminating penalty.
Maybe the only thing that hasn't been addressed over the years is what a negative influence ex-players and managers have on the England team with their misguided, deluded attitudes about England and what it expects. The demands on England players are great even though they have almost nothing to live up to.
In an interview this weekend, Tom Ince, who played an underwhelming game for the U21s against Norway, said this of his father, Paul, an England player with plenty of commitment to the cause and who never came close to winning anything internationally: "If I had a bad game he would be spitting in my face and worse than that!"
Presumably, this was back in the day when spitting in a child's face was universally recognised as a positive motivation tool. Dig underneath that disturbing and unhygienic statement and maybe we can begin to find the psychological root cause of England's problem. But maybe that's too hard to do, much better to retreat into blind nostalgia for the good old days, the good old days which never were.