‘England are not gifted with talent, so we need to find it – and fast’

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/jun/21/england-world-cup-invest-in-coaching

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England’s last game, against Costa Rica, has got to be the worst game you can play in a World Cup. Ordinarily, you lose a game, and you go home. But to stay on and play for nothing? On the biggest stage in the world? That’s unheard of in English football. And it’s bound to be painful.

There is no pride left to salvage, no opportunity for points that might redeem the side. And whatever tactics Roy Hodgson employs, it will be a no-win situation for him. If the team put in a great performance with a change of personnel, everyone will question why he didn’t play them in the first place. If the team loses, the whole enterprise will be further consigned to failure on an epic scale. It is an impossible task.

On Friday evening, most of the players, if not all of them, would have been sat around a TV in the hotel watching Italy lose to Costa Rica. There would have been frustration that Italy played so poorly, (especially after Mario Balotelli promised a win in exchange for a kiss from the Queen). But when you’re clutching at straws, that’s when you know things are bad. In South Africa, in 2010, I remember England sitting together and watching France self-destruct. At the time, we were waiting for our game against Germany, after only just scraping through to the knockout stages. You couldn’t help thinking, “Bloody hell, at least we’re not as bad as France!” That’s never a good mind-set.

Privately, England’s players will inevitably pick over the team, tossing up who was selected and whether someone else should have been given the nod instead. There aren’t as many ifs and buts as there were in South Africa – Frank Lampard’s disallowed goal against Germany the most poignant – but as a player you cannot help run over all eventualities in your head, analysing each performance.

I don’t think any of us should be too disappointed with England’s personnel, though. It isn’t a case of England underperforming; we are simply just not good enough. Whatever your interpretation of Luis Suárez’s second goal – and I’ve heard some left-field ones – I think it was a good goal. I watched the match with Owen Hargreaves, and we raved about the beauty of Fernando Muslera’s goal kick to set up Suárez. So I was baffled to hear Glenn Hoddle had described the goal as a “schoolboy error”, one that you wouldn’t see in a World Cup. Let’s go back four years to Germany’s first goal against England. The goalkeeper, Manuel Neuer, punts the ball up the field, Miroslav Klose latches on to it and … yep, he scores. On both occasions the goal had devastating consequences for England.

There will naturally be a lot of frustration in the England camp. Just to qualify for a World Cup takes two years of hard work. All that effort, to then be knocked out of the competition before you’ve notched even a single point? That’s painful. But there comes a point when you’ve tried your best and it’s not enough. We’re not gifted with an excess of world-class players to shuffle the pack with. You look around the dining table on an England camp and you want to see winners. And there are very few. Only two players who have won the league this season – James Milner hasn’t even made it on to the pitch yet – and two FA Cup winners, with Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain not quite fit and Jack Wilshere playing only a bit-part role in the last quarter of the game against Italy. That can hardly inspire confidence.

So, are we on a downward spiral with England? The question needs to be asked. Certainly, Greg Dyke’s notion of us winning the World Cup in 2022 seems more far-fetched than ever. We can analyse, talk about tactics, but I think we’ve done as good as we can with the players we’ve got. There is no point in picking the bones out of the England side at this point. We’re not blessed with world-class talent. We can’t afford to be choosy about who we pick because we don’t have the numbers to choose from. Because England have lost, it’s easy to question Hodgson’s decisions. But the real answers for England’s failure lie elsewhere.

The main concern for England now has to be how do we produce better players? The B League seems so far adrift of where we need to be focusing. You look at Brazil and how they’ve consistently been so high in the world rankings for decades and decades, and I still don’t get it. I can’t understand it. If it’s just about technique, why aren’t English kids learning technique? Why can’t we do what they do? It’s just learning. Which is what makes me feel so strongly that we need to look at investing more in coaching. The more coaches out there, the better chance of producing a really good coach, and the better the coaches, the better the chance of producing really good young players. Numbers are key, and that’s part of why I don’t buy into the idea that you have to be an ex-professional to be a great coach. But the costs remain prohibitive. To go all the way through to an A-licence badge costs thousands of pounds. That’s a lot for the average person.

In 2010 we also failed to deliver, despite a brilliant qualifying campaign, and notched up only three goals in four games. Appalling. Tactically, we were naive in all of our matches. We didn’t have a plan to overcome a deficit against Germany when we were trailing at halftime. But the main reason that we didn’t translate the quality and confidence we showed in qualifying for the tournament was because we weren’t organised properly, not that we didn’t have the talent.

Four years later, though, and the ability just isn’t there. There is young exciting talent, yes, but we didn’t get to see enough of it in Brazil. But then it would be a brave England manager who put out a less experienced side, risking poor results, and leading to the inevitable criticism that you should have played your more-established stars. Being an England manager and trying to keep everyone happy is something of a sisyphean task.

A lot of people are now asking: what is England’s identity? In terms of footballing qualities, I suppose we have long had a tradition of being defensively strong, something that seems to be missing from England sides these days. To me, though, English football has always been about rolling your sleeves up, passion and aggression. But I’m scratching my head to think of a World Cup team who won on passion and aggression alone. We have already regressed to our worst ever World Cup performance in 1958; let’s not look back any further. We need to find England’s future, and fast.

David James has donated his fee for this column to charity