Manchester City boss Roberto Mancini said having his squad well rested was the key to their 5-0 thrashing of Sunderland at home on Sunday.Adam Johnson opened the scoring after only nine minutes before Argentinean ace Carlos Tevez doubled their advantage from the penalty spot six minutes later.
Second-half strikes from David Silva, Patrick Vieira and Yaya Toure completed the rout and Mancini said his side had benefitted from a lighter schedule in recent weeks.
“In the last 45 days we’ve played every three days and we’ve had more player injuries. That was the problem,” Mancini said.
“Now all the players have recovered and we play Saturday to Saturday we don’t have a problem.”
“We hope we continue to play very well like today – but sometimes it depends on the opponents.”
“I think we played very well. We started well and pressed from the first minute.”
The win lifted City a point above Chelsea into third place in the English Premier League, and the Italian has his sights set on leapfrogging Arsenal into second.
“It was important for us to win this game after the results on Saturday,” he said.
“We are now third but we have to remember that Chelsea have a game in hand. Can we make second? Yes. But there is still a lot of work ahead.”
Sunderland boss Steve Bruce was bitterly disappointed by his team’s capitulation, their sixth loss from seven games, which sees them just eight points clear of the relegation zone with seven games to play.
“My reaction to that can only be total disappointment in the way we played and how we conducted ourselves,” Bruce said.
“We were nowhere near what we’ve been used to this season and we have to make sure we respond in the right manner.”
“We looked very, very disappointing today and as the manager I take responsibility for that.”
“Make no mistake, as from tomorrow we’ll be working very hard on the training ground to try and get us back to where we were.”
While the Luis Suarez racism case has enveloped the club for the past couple of months, intense scrutiny on the performances of certain individuals on the pitch has become somewhat slacker. Summer signing Stewart Downing, who arrived from Aston Villa for the staggering amount of £20m, appears to be a player going through a serious crisis of confidence. The disparity between his performances on the pitch and his value off it are so great at the moment that it beggars belief that he ever cost that much in the first place. Is he Dalglish’s worst signing since returning back to the club?
The gigantic white elephant in the room is, of course, Andy Carroll. The £35m frontman does himself no favours, though. Arriving at the club as the ‘big man’ to Luis Suarez’s ‘little man’, the two have played very few games together. Carroll has either been in the process of returning to full fitness or has been out injured. It has been a never-ending cycle of disappointment.
The galling thing about Carroll is the misconception that Liverpool are not playing to his strengths. The club’s summer purchases of the likes of Downing, Henderson and Enrique were all geared towards getting the best out of Carroll and getting balls into the box. Liverpool, out of all the teams plying their trade in the top flight this term have had the most crosses.
Carroll has varied between lazy and disinterested. His work-rate is at times non-existent and he simply doesn’t look as strong as the bulldozing number nine of yesteryear at Newcastle. His hold up play resembles a man trying to control a balloon and more often than not, balls played up to him come straight back.
He’s not difficult to defend against for ninety per cent of the time, yet on that rare occasion when he does threaten, he can look a real handful. Carroll has been abysmal so far, let’s make no bones about it, but his one saving grace is that there is at least something to work with there. He has the potential to be a great number nine in the future, but only if he starts to believe in that himself and focus less on the price tag hanging around his neck and more on improving his performances on the pitch.
This brings us to Stewart Downing; a player whose reputation has always proved greater than the sum of his parts. Downing should be a byword for underperformance. The creeping suspicion is that he has always struggled when there has been any pressure placed upon him. Poor England performances against the likes of Andorra and Macedonia have become a hallmark of his international career.
Downing has never been blessed with pace and his strength is supposed to lay in his delivery from wide areas. In 20 Premier League games this season, Downing is without an assist. That is not to say, of course, that he has been complete and utter pony for the entire time, but more often than not his delivery leaves a lot to be desired. Frequently unable to beat the first man, too slow to take on a full back and with a worrying propensity to come in off the flank and narrow a midfield devoid of width in the first place even further – Downing has been a huge disappointment.
A lot of the disappointment originates due to the nature of his hefty price tag. Downing always performs well when he’s a big fish in a small pond. His final season at Villa, in a side little was expected of, Downing at times outshone Ashley Young – a player who himself started brightly at Man Utd but has since gone off the boil and faded terribly.
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The relative size of the Downing fee appears to derive from two consequences. Firstly, the fact that Villa themselves appeared to have overpaid for him back in 2009 when he signed for £12m, which meant that even a modicum of success at Villa Park was bound to increase upon an already sizeable valuation due to the nature of his nationality, with English talent still acquiring a baffling premium.
Secondly, the fact that Villa were reluctant to let go of both of Downing and Young in one summer. Ashley Young moved first to Man Utd for £17m and this indirectly inflated the Downing valuation. Villa were in a strong bargaining position, Liverpool, having just been beaten by Man Utd to Young, were not.
In 46 efforts on goal this season, Downing is yet to trouble the scorers. For a player that cost £20m, that is a quite frankly appalling return. The contrast down the left flank alone is enough to make the blood boil – the machine that is Jose Enrique is quicker with the ball than Downing is without it.
Pundits aplenty have decried Liverpool’s lack of cutting edge this term, Dalglish even admitted as much himself after the defeat to Man City this week after calling on his side to develop a more clinical edge in front of goal.
A decent barometer of the toothless nature of Downing et al comes courtesy of the fantastic Opta stats – Liverpool, Man City and Chelsea have all had 282 shots on goal in the Premier League this season, the top three for such a stat in the entire league. Man City have had 132 efforts on target and have 56 goals to show for it. Chelsea from the same number of efforts on goal have been on target with 126 shots and have scored 39 times. Liverpool, however, have been on target with only 114 shots on goal and have a quite miserable return of just 24 goals, less than both Bolton and Blackburn.
It’s also worth pointing out that this Liverpool side have scored the exact same number of goals as Roy Hogson’s team had by this point last season. The difference between performances of the two sides is clear for all to see, though. Whereas Hodgson’s Liverpool were devoid of anything even resembling creativity, it’s clear from the aforementioned stats that at least Dalglish’s side are creating chances. The problem lies in the personnel, though, and their inability to finish them off, with Downing a main culprit.
Jordan Henderson may go missing at times and may appear too eager to play the simple option rather than risk the wrath of the terraces for trying something different, but his purchase has to be seen as a long-term investment and he’ll come good eventually, with him showing signs in the past few games in a more familiar central midfield position.
Carroll has been a huge disappointment and the only thing currently stopping him going down as the Premier League’s biggest ever flop is the fact that Fernando Torres cost Chelsea the princely sum of £50m on the same day. However, while he may have a lot of facets to his game that need improving, Liverpool fans should reserve a smidgen of hope that he’ll come good also. He’s not a ready-made striker and will require a lot of patience, but there is at least potential.
Downing, though, at 27 years of age should surely be approaching the peak of his powers. If a manager investing £20m in you and challenging you to help spearhead the rebuilding of a great club like Liverpool isn’t enough to give you confidence, I don’t know what is.
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It looked a risky purchase at the time but it’s of no coincidence that the fates of Liverpool’s two biggest transfer mishaps in recent times are intertwined and their underperformance interlinked. Carroll at least has the excuse that the service hasn’t been up to scratch, though, whereas for Downing, there is no hiding place.
There is seemingly no stopping Liverpool’s rise up the Premier League table right now as the Reds continue to go from strength to strength under the management of Kenny Dalglish. The victory over Chelsea at Stamford Bridge was their fourth in a row, with their previous Premier League fixtures against Stoke, Fulham and Wolves ending in victories and even more impressively clean sheets, too!
Liverpool now find themselves sixth in the Premier League table, six points and thus just two wins behind Chelsea who are currently in the last Champions League qualification spot. With Luis Suarez yet to get up to speed with the Premier League and record £35 million signing Andy Carroll still to come back from injury, things are definietly looking up for the Reds.
Liverpool are now 9/1 to finish in the top four this season after another win under Kenny Dalglish on Sunday. bet365 spokesman Steve Freeth “Raul Meireles and Co are thriving under King Kenny and Liverpool’s odds to finish in the top four are tumbling by the week under his guidance.”
Also, Fernando Torres is now 10/11 from 4/5 to score 16 or more goals this season after being substituted against his former side. “Torres was well backed both pre-game and again at half time so we were pleased to see him fire a blank” added Freeth.
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Are Liverpool worth a punt at 9/1 to qualify for the Champions League? Make your bets now!
Kevin Nolan has urged former Newcastle United teammate Joey Barton to join him at West Ham, the Mirror reports.
The former Magpies captain moved to Upton Park in June after a falling out with the clubs hierarchy over a new contract.
Barton has also quarrelled with owner Mike Ashley after his outbursts on Twitter and is available to leave St James Park on a free transfer.
Nolan believes Barton needs to escape the tyranny on Tyneside and insists he’ll be appreciated more in East London.
“Would Joey Barton come here? Well, I came here, so I can’t see why Joey Barton would not come,” Nolan said.
“It is a massive club. The way he has been treated over the last couple of years, he is probably looking for an escape.
“He knows I’m here, he knows Sam [who signed Barton for Newcastle in June 2007] is here and what we are about – I can look after him and he can look after me!”
With a year left on his contract Barton could leave Newcastle before the transfer window closes.
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It was current Hammers boss Sam Allardyce who signed him during his brief tenure on Tyneside but whether Barton would be prepared to drop down a division remains to be seen.
Aston Villa winger Marc Albighton has stated that he is not a cheat, despite Wolves fans venting their frustration against him at the weekend.
Karl Henry was sent off for kicking out at the Villa midfielder in Alex McLeish’s side’s 3-2 win over the Molineux club, and Albrighton was given a hard time by the home fans after the incident.
Despite this, Albrighton has maintained that he was the victim and should not be accused of playacting.
“It [the kick] was pretty hard and it winded me. It’s something I wouldn’t want again,” he told Mirror Football.
“It hurts, definitely, when I read the papers on Sunday and Monday. It does hurt a lot, especially when people in the crowd call you a cheat when I was the victim, on the floor getting kicked.
“But that’s football, part and parcel of the game these days, and you have to take the criticism thrown at you. It spurs you on to do even better when people are booing you and calling you a cheat.
“I think he probably saw the red mist and lost his head a little. He’s probably a really nice guy off the pitch although I don’t really know him.
“Something stupid came over him. I’m not saying it’s right to go around kicking people on the sly but in the heat of the moment, these things happen. The emotions are high and the pressure is there,” he admitted.
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Resignation – something tendered by the now former President Christian Wulff on Friday morning. No one at Bayern Munich will offer theirs yet but in deepest Badem-Wuttemberg, Germany’s most successful club slipped further behind Borussia Dortmund in the race for the title.
The Reds are now third, the same position they finished last season after another tepid away showing. Jupp Heycnkes, who was in charge last year at runners up Bayer Leverkusen, is unfamiliar to poor showings on the road. With his previous employers, he enjoyed the best away record in the division in the 2010/2011 season.
However, Bayern’s off colour showing at lowly Freiburg means his side have only won two of their last eight away matches in the Bundesliga. Their opponents on Saturday evening deserve credit for their determined performance. It might just irk Freiburg fans though that they’re the bottom placed side in Germany’s elite, in the knowledge their team can perform to that standard.
Two of their relegation rivals also had the challenge of trying to upset another two of the division’s high fliers. However, neither the recently wretched Hertha Berlin nor Kaiserslautern were able to overcome either of the league’s Borussias. Both victories were narrow which is of credit to the basement battlers. Hertha were greeted with the news on Friday that Otto Rehhagel would take over the vacant manager’s position or should it be Captain Otto?
He told Bild: “The Hertha ship has not sunk, but it has a large leak. I always have the last word. I am now there for Hertha, day and night, and I am always punctual.” His imminent arrival was unable to prevent Kevin Grosskreutz from grabbing a 1-0 win for Dortmund, maintaining the Champions position at the top.
Monchengladbach moved into second meanwhile as they emerged victorious at the Betzenberg, in a game which had two outstanding goals. Hermann put the away side ahead before a beautiful intricate move ended in Arango using the outside of his left foot to curl the ball past Kevin Trapp. Leon Jessen’s 30 yard thunderbolt halved the deficit but the counter attacking demons of Gladbach held on, meaning the Foals moved ahead of Bayern Munich for the first time since August.
The one place where Bayern have found consistency is at home, winning nine of their eleven at the Allianz Arena. However, Schalke visit next weekend.They’re now the top scorers in the Bundesliga having beaten Wolfsburg 4-0 on Sunday. Next weekend’s match-up will see the league’s top goalscorers, Klaas-Jan Huntelaar and Mario Gomez go head to head. Should the Royal Blues win, they’ll move above their hosts. Huub Stevens must seek inspiration from the forces above – no, nothing supernatural, just Gladbach and Dortmund who have both won in Munich this season
Each of the top four have key players missing currently and the table shows who’s currently coping the best. Lying just four points off the top, it would be foolish to rule Bayern out of the title race, although they are starting to lose vital ground on leaders Borussia Dortmund.
However, they haven’t had the panache of Champions. As Captain Philip Lahm stated after Saturday’s game, “If we continue to play like we did today, it will be hard to win the title.” Whilst they are not resigned to losing the title just yet, anyone connected with Bayern Munich will have felt more than an air of resignation after their latest performance.
For more on the Bundesliga, follow @arhindtutt on Twitter.
Matchday 22 Results:
Hoffenheim 1-1 Mainz
Bayer Leverkusen 4-1 Augsburg
Hamburg 1-3 Werder Bremen
Hertha Berlin 0-1 Borussia Dortmund
Kaiserslautern 1-2 Gladbach
Nuremberg 2-1 Cologne
Freiburg 0-0 Bayern Munich
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Iraq coach Wolfgang Sidka was more inclined to focus on his side’s Asian Cup knockout-stage qualification than the 1-0 win over North Korea.The defending champions booked their place in the knockout stages of Asia’s premier national soccer tournament with a largely lacklustre victory on Wednesday and will now face Australia in the last eight.
But they will need a much-improved performance if they are to beat Asia’s top-ranked side, having been pushed all the way by North Korea.
Sidka, however, said after the game that he was just happy to be through to the next round.
“If they were allowed to attack, sure they would have been able to get back into it but we imposed ourselves on the match,” he said.
“We kept the ball, especially in the first half, we had a lot of ball possession so we didn’t allow them to create opportunities.”
“It was always our plan that we would have more ball possession and not let them play.”
“The most important thing is that we are now playing Australia in the quarter-final. I think we deserve this victory, we played very well, especially in the first half.”
“I was very satisfied with the way we played. In the last 20 minutes, North Korea did everything to try and get back into the match so we lost a little bit of possession and control of the match but not too much.”
“In the end, 1-0, I think we deserve it. We are happy and we are looking forward to the quarter-final.”
North Korea went behind after Kerrar Jasim scored the game’s only goal on 22 minutes, and coach Jo Tong-Sop believes the early strike dented his side’s confidence.
“We conceded the goal too early in the first half. This disrupted our tactics,” Jo said.
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“In the second half we improved and tried to make chances to score goals but we lost the match 1-0.”
“This was the last match and we didn’t get a good result. I think for the players, they had psychological problems and so were unable to read the match.”
“Tactically they didn’t do so well especially when the other team played long and medium-range passes. We didn’t react too quickly when we conceded the goal.”
Newcastle recorded an excellent 3-1 away victory over West Brom on Sunday at the Hawthorns.
Hatem Ben Arfa and Papiss Cisse scored in the first 12 minutes to give the Tyneside club a stranglehold on the fixture, before the Senegal international scored his second and Newcastle’s third just after the half-hour mark.
Shane Long pulled one back for the Baggies after the break, but the game finished in favour of the Geordies, who are now level on points with Chelsea.
Alan Pardew was quick to praise his squad after the victory.
“I just thought we had a real good control of our passing today and our movement was terrific,” he told Sky Sports after the game.
“We tried to work down the sides of (Youssouf) Mulumbu because he protects the centre of the pitch really well and that worked well for us.
“But you need outstanding players to win games here and our best player stepped forward today – Hatem Ben Arfa was really, really difficult to play against, some of his runs were incredible.
“And Demba (Ba) and Papiss are going to score goals and I kept saying to the staff, ‘we’re going to get three goals in a game shortly because we’ve got so many goalscorers’, and today it came.
“We’ve just got a really good bunch who are trying so hard. To have the same points as Chelsea at this stage is phenomenal, really.
“And you have to take your hats off to the players – they’ve worked really, really hard,” he concluded.
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Newcastle host Liverpool next Sunday at the Sports Direct Arena.
Over the years some great players have pulled on a West Ham shirt, however there has also been a long list of truly bizarre and utterly frustrating catastrophes.
Narrowing it down to a top (or bottom) five proved a challenge due to the revolving door policy under Harry Redknapp, the over-priced, over-rated, has-beens of the Curbishley regime and the just downright ill conceived, reactionary purchases of Avram Grant and Glenn Roeder.
So the final shortlist is players that stand out for their shear bizarre ineptitude and incompetence that left many of us tearing our hair out and screaming into a cushion.
I could have made a list based on purely loan players that were never fit to wear the shirt, and there have been a lot of those. These include Sasa Ilic, who only played 50 minutes for the Hammers but managed to inspire Everton to a 4-0 victory at Upton Park before getting subbed.
Recently he appeared in some low budget films in his native Serbia, some say he had been acting as a goalkeeper his whole career. Mido was another shocker, he offered to play for just £1,000 a week, which appealed to the board at a time when our finances were in a similar state to Greece’s, it looks like we over-paid though.
Wayne Quinn took the biscuit. He was brought in with a host of loans signings during the first season back in the old Division 1 in 2003, his lack of pace, positioning, awareness and general ability to even kick a football amazed and confused fans and opponents alike. But as none of these geniuses were actual West Ham players they have all been left out for people we had to actually sign and waste money on.
First up in the hall of shame and propping up the rear with his massive backside, at number five, it’s Titi Camara. One of the many wastes of space Redknapp inflicted on us as he squandered the £18m we got for Rio Ferdinand. He was signed from Liverpool after earning a bit of a cult status for scoring some vital goals and playing after the death of his father.
At West Ham he only earned hatred and ridicule as he made 14 appearances between 2000 and 2003 before being loaned to Al-Ittihad in Saudi Arabia. During his spell he failed to score a single goal and when the club cancelled his contract for being useless and over-weight he tried to sue them…he was unsuccessful. He is now the sports minister and manager of the Guinea national team.
Number four is Joey Beauchamp. Signed by Billy Bonds as a promising young winger in 1994 for a then club record of £1.2m. After complaining about feeling home sick (for Oxford of all places) he couldn’t handle the traffic during his travel down the M40 to training each day. He was sold to Swindon (only 20 miles nearer to Oxford) without playing a competitive game.
Beauchamp makes the list purely because his sod-this-for-a-laugh attitude to football caused Bonds to question his faith in the game. Later he returned to Oxford United and became a very popular player for them. His story took a darker turn as he recently admitted to battling with drink and depression following his retirement.
Coming in at three is Marco Boogers. A Dutch striker signed by Redknapp from Sparta Rotterdam in 1995 as an answer to our goal scoring woes. In only his second appearance during an away trip to Old Trafford he was sent off early on for assaulting Gary Neville. Although extreme violence against Gary Neville is not he worst crime in the world, Boogers then legged it to Holland and reportedly hid in a caravan.
This turned out to be an urban myth and began with a misunderstanding by a journalist who heard ‘caravan’ instead of ‘car again’ when asking about Boogers travel arrangements to his rehab in Holland. He made a further two substitute appearances, then a recurring knee injury and a major case of don’t-fancy-it-itis saw him return permanently to the Low Countries. After he left Redknapp described him as an awful player and stated that he’d only seen him play in a video in which he looked ‘world class’…. a lesson there maybe?
The number two spot goes to the enigmatic Savio Nsereko. Supposedly a promising young striker who starred for the German under-19s, he was one of the more bizarre signings as part of Gianluca Nani’s ‘project’ during Gianfranco Zola tenure. He was signed to replace Craig Bellamy in the 2009 transfer window for reportedly up to £9m with add-ons from Brescia. Savio, as he was known, made a handful of less then average appearances in which he looked out of his depth in the Premier League, even against Hull and West Brom.
In the press conference at his unveiling his high-pitched voice sounded strangely similar to that of Michael Jackson’s, and as it turned out he kind of played like him too. He was later swapped as part of the Manual Da Costa deal with Fiorentina, where he failed to impress and was bounced around Europe in a succession of ever worsening loan moves. Most recently he fetched up at Serie B side Juve Stabia where he is now AWOL (for the second time) and currently being hunted by Interpol.
But the king of bad West Ham signings is Gary Breen. His constant poor performances during the 2002/03 relegation season have now become synonymous with the emotional roller-coaster of supporting West Ham and even inspired a book on the subject by Robert Banks.
Glenn Roeder signed him on a free transfer as Breen was without a club and had turned in some impressive performances for the Republic of Ireland during the 2002 World Cup, in particular scoring against known world beaters Saudi Arabia. On that basis Breen had the pick of European clubs, he chose West Ham over some ‘generous offers’, reportedly Inter Milan and Barcelona, and more realistically Charlton. In an interview reminiscent of David Brent in The Office he stated on Sky’s Goals on Sunday in 2009 that he would have moved to the San Siro if he hadn’t failed a medical.
After an infamous bust-up with Roeder following a defeat away to Manchester United, in which he was heavily blamed for many of the goals, Breen tried to suggest the wet turf was the reason he was unable to play to his usual high standard and even posses the most basic levels of foot and eye co-ordination. The Manchester United players seemed to cope with the conditions as they ended up winning 6-0. Breen was let go in the cull following relegation that year after making 18 embarrassing appearances.
Although no list of terrible West Ham players would be complete without mentioning superstars such as Gary Charles, Benni McCarthy, Nigel Quashie and Keiron Dyer, who will only be remembered as a drain on resources and taking vast amounts of money for being either drunk, fat, rubbish or constantly injured (in that order) and lacking any integrity or professionalism when it came to their supposed careers, the main five stick out as the biggest horror shows.
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We get a lot of criticism in this country for the way we produce our players. Accusations of a coaching mentality based on direct football and not enough investment in our youth appears to be in stark contrast to better-organised foreign national academies such as France’s Clairefontaine, one of twelve national academies in France.
Gareth Southgate, Head of Elite Development at the FA, has been one of the major critics for the way we coach our football and has suggested that the way we start coaching young players should be different. Southgate proposed preventing players from playing eleven a side games until they were thirteen. His reasoning for this was that similar systems occur in Spain, France and Italy. The benefits of this proposal are that players concentrate more on technique and skill as opposed to physicality and athleticism.
Everyone can see why this would be positive for the English game, too rarely do we see players such as Wilshere or Rooney come through with such natural ability and technique. However this doesn’t mean we should abandon the ‘English’ style of football altogether, nor does it mean that we can’t find a balance between the way we coach now and the continental approach.
Wallsend
Undoubtedly one of the most successful junior football teams in England, Wallsend graduates include: Alan Shearer, Peter Beardsley, Michael Bridges, Steve Bruce, Michael Carrick, Steven Taylor and Brian Laws. Wallsend, a suburb of Newcastle, has produced sixty-seven professional footballers in all and thirty-four coaches. They must be doing something right.
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Senrab F.C.
Based in East London Senrab is our other bastion of English coaching. A true vindication of the way we coach our youth the Sunday League club has produced players such as: Sol Campbell, Jermain Defoe, John Terry, Bobby Zamora and Ledley King as well as coaches like Ray Wilkins and Alan Curbishley.
Between these two clubs some of our country’s best players have been produced. Brian Laws, one of Wallsend’s graduates, told The Telegraph that the Tyneside outfit taught him:
“Guidance and discipline. It was always very well organised, everything always ran smoothly. Kids’ football could be pretty chaotic, but not at Wallsend…you were treated like a pro. It gave you a sense of comfort, and you’d do everything the best you could…they were good people and you gave them your all.”
Lessons to be learned
Our academy systems in England may not be perfect, but that does not mean that the formula is completely wrong. People criticise English coaching for a whole number of reasons but a large part of that is a consequence of the failures of the national team. People see the failures of the national team as a failure of the way those players have been taught. And maybe to a certain extent that is the case. However it is far more likely that there are simply not enough clubs like Wallsend or Senrab around. Perhaps before completely revamping the coaching system in this country people like Gareth Southgate, with his position of responsibility, should try to learn from these few successful clubs before forcing them to change their approach.
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Before we look abroad to find examples of success we should be looking at examples of success in our own country. Yes we can take positives from foreign systems and incorporate them in to our own, not to do so would be both ignorant and arrogant, but that doesn’t mean that there are not many strengths in the way our coaching is carried out. We have produced some of the best players in the world in this country and our failures on the international stage are down to a number of reasons, not just the lack of basic training for under fourteens.
Follow Hamish Mackay on Twitter @H_Mackay
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