Sacked!

doctorspin wrote:

Dello wrote:

doctorspin wrote:

JKLever wrote:Doc, do your patients know you have anger management issues?

Just can't stand incompetence and self-centered glibness.

I'm doing my best. It's not easy running a cricket forum.

I'd post a smiley if this freekin forum worked properly with Opera!

Henry Nolonga wrote:I'm at work at the moment so i can't see, but is that the one where the Doc says something about their children dating a black person?

Dello wrote:You can't polish a turd, though.

I knew England would lose once I saw the pitch was a bit muddy.

The paucity of even basic technical ability among English players is so depressing it's almost funny. How can you possibly be in a job where you earn 50 grand a week yet unable to manage the simplest things that, in this case, guys earning less than 50 grand a year were able to achieve effortlessly?

Croatia adapted to the marginally tricky playing conditions with ease.

England looked like they were playing with a hand grenade.

And if you've seen the under 21s lately, you'll know that there's nothing coming through the system that's any cause for hope.

It's not like English people are genetically incapable of being technically excellent footballers, it just that technique doesn't appear to be a much valued attribute among those who teach and develop kids in this country.

Even today, watching Sky Sports News, hardly any of the disgruntled fans and 'experts' have mentioned it - they're still banging on about "passion" and "heart" as if the finer nuances of winning football can all be barged aside in an orgy of "up and at them" chest-beating and simply trying harder.

As usual, as the world has moved on and developed, England are still stuck with their heads up their collective arses, sticking to good old plan A, drawn up in 1888.

If his successor talks of getting back to what English players do best — high tempo, hustle and bustle, up and at ’em, big man up front — we will not have learnt from this humiliation. The rest of the world has seen English high tempo for more than four decades. Seen it, dealt with it, stuffed it. Next.

holcs wrote:Sh1t, i'll tell you what, i'd be sh1tting myself if I earn't in excess of 40k a week.

Fair enough at Grass roots level, but these guys play day in day out, earn stupid amounts of money, and at the end of the day they can't trap a ball, or string 4 passes together.

Steve McClaren met his Waterloo earlier and, yes, at times he compounded English weaknesses with some of his own — not introducing Owen Hargreaves immediately with the score at 2-2 on Wednesday was his final, gigantic error — but the faults will not be eradicated by the swift issue yesterday morning of his P45. There is a crisis of confidence within our game that begins in youth football with panicked yelps to lump the ball out of trouble rather than play it away and continues all the way up the ladder until it manifests itself in a national side who, if they concede one goal, immediately compound their problem by letting in a second.

Brooking talks up his skills programme, but there is little point in teaching a ten-year-old the Cruyff turn if he is expected to put it into practice on a full-sized pitch with his coach screaming at him to clear his lines. The whole process requires reform, not one executive aspect of it.

The build-up to this game brought talk of quotas for foreign players, but how is that the answer? A league stuffed with second-rate Englishmen by bureaucratic decree will not benefit the national team. The rot sets in — as Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA’s director of football development, has identified, without doing a whole lot about it — in youth football, which is increasingly ruled by fear, too.

JKLever wrote:

holcs wrote:Sh1t, i'll tell you what, i'd be sh1tting myself if I earn't in excess of 40k a week.

Fair enough at Grass roots level, but these guys play day in day out, earn stupid amounts of money, and at the end of the day they can't trap a ball, or string 4 passes together.

yet its the youth coaching that needs to be looked at, theres fark all that can be done for this generation.

If I was a youth coach, I'd be farking embarrased by the standard of player this country produces.
There will always be exceptions and a fair number of the england team are technically gifted. Yet we then play the like of Campbell & Lescott at the back who cant pass the ball.

A lot of the english coaches should be thinking about why clubs go for foreign managers. Simple, because they're still playing prehistoric football.

Yes, i'm talking about the likes of you Sam Allardyce & Neil Warnock

Batfink Begins wrote:**Lara in opinions formed solely by reading t'interweb shock**

In most counties, seven-a-side mini-soccer ends in the final year of junior school, at which point the under11 age group converts to football as it is played by grown-ups. Team numbers are the same and, most importantly, so are pitch measurements. As in discount clothing stores, one size fits all. The reason English football has a tradition of brick outhouse central defenders who cannot pass and perpetual motion machines in midfield without an ounce of the class of Cesc Fàbregas is because our youth football is geared to little else.

I have another lad playing under12 football. This season a new team joined his competition. Massive kids, lots of attitude. I had them marked down as the league winners before a ball was kicked and after seven games they are two points clear. It is a power game for the preteens. And then, later in life, when everybody can wallop the ball a long way and chase it down, the sport becomes skill-based once more, except by that time we are lagging behind as a nation because we have focused all our efforts on the art of a panic-stricken clearance into touch to release the pressure.

Lara Lara Laughs wrote:

Batfink Begins wrote:**Lara in opinions formed solely by reading t'interweb shock**

Or simply he's put what I think, better than I could, so I posted it.

eowyn wrote:The Scots payed a damn sight better than we did, dispite their poorer resourses and smaller numbers.

JKLever wrote:Another good Martin Samuel article
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/martin_samuel/article2910642.ece

In most counties, seven-a-side mini-soccer ends in the final year of junior school, at which point the under11 age group converts to football as it is played by grown-ups. Team numbers are the same and, most importantly, so are pitch measurements. As in discount clothing stores, one size fits all. The reason English football has a tradition of brick outhouse central defenders who cannot pass and perpetual motion machines in midfield without an ounce of the class of Cesc Fàbregas is because our youth football is geared to little else.

and....

I have another lad playing under12 football. This season a new team joined his competition. Massive kids, lots of attitude. I had them marked down as the league winners before a ball was kicked and after seven games they are two points clear. It is a power game for the preteens. And then, later in life, when everybody can wallop the ball a long way and chase it down, the sport becomes skill-based once more, except by that time we are lagging behind as a nation because we have focused all our efforts on the art of a panic-stricken clearance into touch to release the pressure.

Batfink Begins wrote:Oh, and the kids I coached a couple of years back were generally technically very good, including the girls. I reckon we could be the downfall of our own unique style of play.