The Next England Squad

Di Caniooooo! wrote:Its like this generation of English talent decided they'd rather play cricket or some other sport. Where'd the talent go?

christmasborocooper wrote:Shit goalkeepers

Romford Pele wrote:Agendas...

Romford Pele wrote:But Milner has never ever looked like a world beater, and at 27, you doubt whether he can improve anymore. Welbeck has all those ingredients that you look for in the modern striker. Nobody will question his goal record, it's poor and needs improving, but he already has the necessary technique. As Pierre says, he just needs more opportunities in the CF position rather than becoming United's new Park. I fear for him though, especially as it looks like United may play more of a 4411 this season.

luisalbertohedrinksurine wrote:Looking at the shit in that squad you have to assume there's a lot of injuries to the 'real' England players. There aren't. Michael Dawson, Andy Carroll and Danny Porridge are probably the only ones missing. 

Rio Ferdinand calls for radical reform and a new identity for England

Manchester United defender says FA need to save English football by developing a new playing philosophy for all levels

Rio Ferdinand believes England must be prepared to miss out on qualifying for major tournaments in order to Undergo radical reform and rediscover their identity.

The Manchester United defender says that process needs to start with the implementation of a new philosophy that can be applied to England teams at all levels – something he believes has been overlooked ever since Glenn Hoddle was dismissed as manager in 1999.

Emphasising the need for change, Ferdinand said there is a disconnect between the senior national side and the Under-21 and youth teams, in stark contrast to many other football nations. He also expressed major concerns about the technical abilities of upcoming English players and questioned whether youngsters are being taught basic skills.

For the Football Association to put things right and avoid the sort of ignominy England endured this summer, when the Under-21s and the Under-20s performed miserably at the European Championship and World Cup respectively, Ferdinand believes it will "take someone to grab it by the scruff of the neck and say, 'This is what we're going to do and we're going to take 10 years to do it.'"

In Ferdinand's eyes England need to go back to the drawing board and establish a clear way of playing across all of the country's representative teams, which is something that Dan Ashworth, the FA's director of elite development, has accepted is a vital issue that he intends to "pin down".

Ferdinand, who retired from international football in May, said: "What is our identity? I've said that on Twitter I don't know how many times, and people come back and say, 'What are you talking about?' But what is our identity? We started to see something when Glenn Hoddle was in charge, a bit of an identity then, free-flowing football, and you would say we were starting to get an idea of the pattern of what he wanted to implement in the team. Since then I don't think we've actually really seen an identity, where you could say: 'That's an England team,' where you look at the Under-21s and go: 'That's an England team.'

"If all the names were taken off the back of the shirts and the colours were changed, you couldn't go in there and say, 'That's an England team, that's our identity, that's the way we play.' And that's from the Under-16s right up to the senior team.

"Whereas you look at an Italian team, a Dutch team, a Spanish team, a German team or a Brazilian team, without seeing the names on the shirts, you would identify them because they're working from a script. You could put an Under-16 lad into the senior Spanish team or Italian team, he might not have the attributes in terms of physique and speed to be able to deal with it but positionally I'm sure he'd know what to do because that's what they're taught, day in, day out."

Ferdinand claimed that Hoddle was the only one of the six permanent England managers he played Under – Kevin Keegan, Sven-Goran Eriksson, Steve McClaren, Fabio Capello and Roy Hodgson – in an international career that yielded 81 caps who put in place the sort of structure he is advocating.

"Hoddle – and this is no reflection on how good or bad the other managers were but it's just what I saw – said this is the way we're going to play and, when a new player came in, they knew exactly what was going on because there was a system we played and which was adaptable, and you could see that would have filtered downto the other teams, to the Under-21s."

Ferdinand says Hoddle had a big say in what went on with the Under-21s because he was close to Peter Taylor. "I just don't think you see that connection between our team and the Under-21s, or the Under-17s and the Under-20s team and the senior team, and I think that doesn't bode well for the England team.

"I hear there is a new system being put in place and that St George's Park is part of that. Time will tell us what is going on.

"We might not qualify for a World Cup or a European Championship but I would rather not qualify for one or two tournaments knowing that in 10 years' time we will have an identity that everyone can identify with and be proud of."

While Ferdinand points to young, talented players who are already part of Hodgson's senior set-up, he says the key element is getting them to perform collectively – a conundrum successive England managers struggled to resolve with the so-called "golden generation" of which the central defender was part and which included Steven Gerrard, Paul Scholes and Frank Lampard.

Ferdinand has reservations about what is happening in the lower age groups. "There are some quality players," he said. "You look at our club alone: [Danny] Welbeck, [Phil] Jones, [Chris] Smalling, [Tom] Cleverley. At other clubs you've got [Daniel] Sturridge, Jack Wilshere, [Alex] Oxlade-Chamberlain. There are a lot of talented players around but I think what has been the problem for years is how you put those talented players into a team to work.

"And then I think you've got to look deeper than that and look at the younger age groups. Are they being coached right? Is their development right? Are they getting enough hours?"

"Young players in other countries … I watched the Under-20 World Cup, there was a kid called Quintero playing for Colombia, the way he receives the ball – you don't really see young players in our country doing that. I can name loads of other players, they receive the ball with players around them and manipulate the ball, protect the ball – are we being taught those basics the way other teams are? You can't tell me that we haven't got some great young players coming through, like the names I've mentioned. But the basics that we're being taught, are they there?"

Although there is widespread criticism of a culture where young footballers are seen to be given too much too soon, in particular when it comes to the financial rewards, Ferdinand believes the biggest barrier to success for homegrown English players is the lack of pathways to the first team.

"Are the kids getting the opportunities nowadays that we had? Harry Redknapp [the West Ham United manager at the time] wasn't scared to put me in. His job wasn't on the line after two or three games if he hadn't won."But the stakes are much higher now, it's a risk and a manager is thinking about himself 'I want to continue in this job, I want to make sure that I'm here for three or four years. If I bring that kid in and he messes up a couple of times … '

"Harry Redknapp used to say to me, if you make a mistake don't worry, just don't make the same mistake in a game twice. He wanted you to learn from that and keep playing football. Do kids get that time now? Do managers have in their knowledge that the owners are going to sack them if they put a kid in and it reflects badly on a few results? There are so many different things that you can hang it on but I think this [the state of English football] is probably an accumulation of all of them."

Gary Neville: 'British football needs to get back to a quota system'

Sky Sports pundit fears for the game unless Premier League teams field minimum of three players from home countries

English talent gets left behind as Premier League keeps importing

On the first day of the new season Premier League teams selected fewer English players than ever before

The conversation taking place in a cramped corridor at the Stadium of Light had turned to the lack of English players on view on Saturday afternoon. Martin Jol barely paused for thought before answering a perennially vexed question. "It's a problem," said Fulham's manager. "You have to deal with it."

There were only four in the starting XIs as Sunderland were beaten 1-0 by Jol's side – Jack Colback and Adam Johnson for Sunderland and Kieran Richardson and Steve Sidwell for Fulham – but Jol's shrug was one of resignation rather than indifference. "That's typical for the Premier League," said the Dutchman, at the end of a day which helped mark a record low in terms of the number of English players starting top-flight games on the season's opening weekend.

Rewind to the first day of the inaugural Premier League season in August 1992 and 177 players – or 73.1% – featuring in first XIs held English nationality. The weekend just gone has seen that figure plummet to 74, or 33.6%. The decrease has left the Premier League in a position where it fields significantly fewer indigenous players than Spain's La Liga, Germany Bundesliga, Italy's Serie A or France's Ligue Oneother major leagues around Europe.

Not since Coventry in 1992 has a Premier League side kicked off a campaign with an all-English XI but things have reached the point where, of the 61 signings who have cost the elite division's 20 clubs a transfer fee this summer, only 12 have involved Englishmen. The reasons for this growing disconnect are myriad and complex but the situation is exacerbated by the reality that those English players who do smash through our game's "glass ceiling" command radically inflated transfer fees.

"Seven or eight years ago at Tottenham I had Michael Dawson, Jermaine Jenas, Aaron Lennon, Tom Huddlestone, all English guys," Jol said. "But it is impossible to do that nowadays because they are so expensive."

Gary Neville, the former Manchester United and England right-back, has acknowledged that, were he starting his career today, he would probably have found himself crowded out of the Old Trafford first-team picture by overseas imports. In an ideal world Neville would like to see positive discrimination for British talent in the form of a quota system.

This idea of potentially good English players becoming lost in the system during an era of foreign managers and reduced domestic scouting networks is something that particularly concerns Alan Pardew. "We all have to abide by rules but the rules aren't fixed so that we have to play English players," said Newcastle United's manager, who could field virtually a complete team of high-quality French players sourced at comparative bargain prices.

"That's something that, in my opinion, could be looked at. At the moment, though, you're going to play your best XI no matter what. If they are 11 foreigners, so be it. But we must be careful not to overlook English players in Premier League squads who should be getting games."

Pardew has high hopes that one young Englishman, Paul Dummett, a left-back from Gosforth, the same Newcastle suburb that produced Alan Shearer, will make at least 10 appearances for his side this season. Nearly 22, Dummett, who has played for Wales Under-21s on account of his father's birth in the principality but remains eligible to play for England, was virtually invisible at St James' Park until a loan stint at St Mirren last season. "We kept getting good reports," Pardew said. "So we watched him play against Celtic and he was the best player on the pitch."

Though Dummett made his debut as a first-half substitute against Manchester City tonight, his problem is that if Italy's Davide Santon – a former José Mourinho favourite in his Internazionale days – is not fit to operate at left-back, France's Mapou Yanga-Mbiwa can fill in, as can the highly rated Massadio Haïdara. "For a player to break into my team past Santon they have to really believe in their ability," Pardew said. "But you can sense Paul's starting to think he's as good as Santon. That makes him a candidate.

"We are now focusing our academy very much on local players rather than searching the world for youngsters. We want to maximise the ability in our area so to have Dummett come through is just brilliant. It sends out an important message."

If the Dummetts of this world do make it on to Match of the Day, their chances of progressing to wear Three Lions on their shirts soar to almost one in two. Last weekend 49% of English Premier League starters already possessed senior international caps, thereby reflecting the slender nature of Roy Hodgson's talent pool.

Alarmingly only three – Ross Barkley, Jonjo Shelvey and Nathan Redmond – of the 23-man England Under-21 squad who beat Scotland 6-0 last week started for Premier League clubs at the weekend. "Look at any other country's league and you'll see they don't have the same numbers of foreign players as us," says Peter Taylor, the former England Under-21 manager who took temporary charge of the Under-20s this summer.

"The number of foreign players in the Premier League is restricting the development of young English players. I'd love to see a restriction on the number of foreigners allowed but I'm told we aren't allowed to do that."

Not that Taylor is entirely downcast. Encouraged by developments including the introduction of smaller-sized games on smaller-sized pitches for younger children, improved coach education and increased emphasis on raising technical standards, he believes the current trend is reversible. "We're trying hard," he said. "We're changing the way we play. We're playing more of our football from the back.

"Hopefully we'll be able to restrict the influx by producing more world-class youngsters clubs won't be able to ignore. But young English players have to take their opportunities. If they feel sorry for themselves, they'll be left behind."