i couldnt give a monkey's chuff tbh, i lost faith in england aftet the 2006 world cup

You cannot change everything overnight. Over hauling grass roots football in order to bring through technically better players takes time, first you need to recondition coaches then you have to wait for the kids to start coming through.
There has been the seeds of change sewn, many inituatives have been laid out. But results take time.
Until then we have to play to our strengths.

A lot of this hasn't been helped by all the managers since trying to play with Gerrard and Lampard as central midfield players.

Yes, they are both great players for their clubs, but neither of them have the technical brilliance of Scholes to play in the CM.

The England team under Sven pushed Scholes out wide to accomodate the pair of them.

Sadly since then, England haven't had anyone capable of playing like Scholes. Carrick has flattered to deceive for england, and our savior, Wilshire is sicker than Darren Anderton.

Midfield is where the games are won and lost.

As DJ says, hopefully this will be sorted in the near future by the FA's change to coaching.

The top teams, annd I include the Dips here, all have some prommising yout coming through in their under 21's. Sadly we have to give them to Pearce for England duty.

England are a bit of a shambles but at the same time the England fans and media are ridiculously melodramatic about it.

The facts as I see them:

- Our teams are consistently in or around the top ten in the world and on average end up in the top 8 or 16 in the summer tournaments. That's not all that bad. Expectations are too high.
- Despite lacking the cornucopia of great players that certain countries possess, we do regularly produce players who are good enough to play a key role in the world's best club sides. It's just that several other countries have more of them.
- International managers suffer from only being able to work with players for a fraction of the time club managers do. It's much harder for them to build up a cohesive team, understandings between players and fine tune tactics. The best international sides of recent years have come from countries where a lot of the players come from the same team or where there is a 'national style' that everyone shares and understands. This can't be said about England, with the even spread of domestic talent across a few teams, which have different styles.

Most people understand that a core problem is quality raw material. We'll see what results the FA's recent reforms have brought about in the coming years. In the meantime, I suggest we sit back, cheer when they are winning and laugh at them when they are losing.

Our players aren't good enough technically

A manager can only tell the players what tactics to deploy, he can't turn them into better players

Our players simply aren't as good as we think, thought that was quite obvious tbh

Against Ireland our two best players were carrick and lampard. Some of the passes and movement they had in the middle was great. But sadly we seem to love to play carp quick players rather than keep the ball. Walcott, chamberlain, Sturridge are all terrible and can keep the ball.

And vidic that's nonsense about scholes who only had a couple good years if that for England and can only do what he does In a top side like utd

And vidic that's nonsense about scholes who only had a couple good years if that for England

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Yes, because the numpty Sven moved him out to the left.

There is a very good reason why Zidane admired Scholes and Sven wasted it.

Against Ireland our two best players were carrick and lampard. Some of the passes and movement they had in the middle was great. But sadly we seem to love to play carp quick players rather than keep the ball. Walcott, chamberlain, Sturridge are all terrible and can keep the ball.
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Rubbish. Carrick and Lampard couldn't see the right passes if you drew a map for them. The only one who could utilise our strengths was Rooney.

Scholes only had a couple of good years for England?



There goes the opinion of somebody who knows nothing about Football. Apart from the 2-3 game stupid experiment on the left wing, I don't remember Scholesy ever having a bad game for England.

Best midfielder this country has ever produced in my opinion and a lot of VERY famous players opinions too.

Lol i would watch the game again if I were u.
Lampard over the top to Rooney when Rooney tried some stupid volley.
Carrick into rooneys feet time and time again. Lampard into the channels constantly for Walcott and chamberlain to mess up. They were running the show.
If we had a decent right back and a couple decent wide men we would be a much better team.

You say I know nothing about football when I say something about scholes who I think was a fantastic player. And then say you think he's the best player England have ever produced and u expect to be unbiased and have a conversation about him? Lol

The strange thing is that during Japan/Korea 2002 England produced the best display i've seen from our country against Argentina in the group stages.

We actually kept possession of the ball, not just knocking it around amongst the keeper and centre backs but going into midfield and in the attacking third, they had a couple of chances but so did we. It was a really mature display, similar to the performance in Rome in 1998, but we won.

I don't know why England produce these types of technical, good quality performances every know and again and don't set up to play that way all time.

The first i heard about "overhauling grass roots football" came after the horrendous showing in Euro 2000, some 13 years ago, about the same time Germany decided to stop having meetings and talking about a radical change and actually got on and id something about it!

- Our teams are consistently in or around the top ten in the world and on average end up in the top 8 or 16 in the summer tournaments. That's not all that bad. Expectations are too high.
- Despite lacking the cornucopia of great players that certain countries possess, we do regularly produce players who are good enough to play a key role in the world's best club sides. It's just that several other countries have more of them.
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And why do those countries consistently have more of them? Clearly that points to a problem that needs solving.

Expectations are not too high. Performances and coaching are consistently too poor.

I know his views were not to everyone's taste but I thought the best England have looked in ages was during the time Hoddle was manager.

As a technical player himself who probably didn't get as many caps as he should he understood the emphasis on keeping the ball.

If I was English and wanted someone to look after the U21's then I would much prefer Hoddle to Pearce. Then again there are probably a few that would be preferrable to Pearce come to think of it.