One of the most honest assessments of England's problems

[Copps is Magic]

.. in recent tournaments. Highly worth a listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRdbUfcBPZw

[GazLaz]

Basically admitting they weren’t that bothered about playing for England.

[Copps is Magic]

Gaz, I think your powers of interpretation could probably stretch a bit further than that. If you watch it right to the last comment you'll understand they were bothered about playing for England. All three were highly motivated characters, I don't think that can be doubted for one second. But as players, and socially, they were isolated and had the mentality they were playing as individuals (to borrow Gerrard's words). The analogy of four little Paraguayans (apparently happy at being together) running rings round them is a very good analogy.

Major problem is it not? To me it quite obviously correlates to the changes in the English game over the last few decades. The way in which clubs gained primary importance due to the huge influx of finance. The influx of foreign players (and the fact English players don't play abroad) who didn't have that sense of competition with each other, probably a lot less skilled, but ultimately happier and coached to play as a unit. Crucially, the managers we had at the time supported this system, they didn't seek to change it. They thought it was good enough to have big name players in each position and they would automatically go out and perform in a rigid system.

[arkseyrover]

A good honest discussion. And an excellent summary Copps. And in retrospect, we the fans, were shafted by the FA, the guardians of our game who make the managerial appointments and who prefer to give protection and focus to their holy money machine - Sky's Premier League - and  who stood back and did feck all about it.

[GazLaz]

They said club was more important than country to them. With that mindset it was impossible to succeed.

[DMnumber4]

All three seemed to agree that they could have done more.

And that England MIGHT have got further if they'd had a more "adventurous" manager, but we don't produce them. And if we do (Howe) then the chances of them getting the requisite top 4 / European football experience is minimal.

So the FA promoted from within - something quite common in other countries e.g. Spain (can anyone name their manager? - and plumped for Southgate.

If Gareth and his team fail in Russia - I think failure to get out of the groups would constitute that - then we should have appointed a well known foreign coach.

What I'm trying to say is you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. We're stuck in 4-4-2 mode and need to stop 'copying' German or Spanish blueprints and go our own way. Hopefully the way the U17's & U20's have performed, we're on our way to doing that!

[Copps is Magic]

They said club was more important than country to them. With that mindset it was impossible to succeed.

That is exactly true, up until a point. 11 otherwise talented players didn't suddenly turn up on a match day all with the same mentality by some coincidence did they? It was produced by the wider circumstances in the game. Gerrard, Ferdidnand, and Lampard are just examples here - you have to abstract from them.

Nevertheless, they basically admitted that they were turning up for knock-out games in 'hot' countries knowing on the bus they were probably going to lose. Very fundamental problem that.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Well, I've watched the first 4 minutes and my bullshit monitor screamed for a rest.

Argument so far:

1) Ferdinand and Lampard were best mates up to 20-22 years old.

2) Then they went off to different clubs and stopped being mates. So that meant that they didn't work together well for England.

3) Spain's Golden Generation played together as kids and that got them used to playing together so it overcame the club animosity.

At which point I'm waiting for the presenter to say the obvious: "Hang on Rio - you and Frank were playing together as kids..."

Sounds like old men making excuses for not actually being as good as they'd like to think they were.

That said, I suspect there's a kernel of truth in what they are saying. There's no other obvious explanation for us regularly being embarrassed by countries whose players are clearly, objectively of a lower quality than ours. Which comes back to the argument I've been making for years, that the remorseless flood of money and hype into the game that Murdoch has unleashed has distorted the priorities to the extent that we can't even turn out a group of players who can put up a fight against Iceland.

If you want an example of how the dominance of the PL has skewed priorities over the years, think about how embittered Clough was never to get the chance to manage England. He was the pre-eminent club manager of his era. But he would have dropped any club he was at to manage England. Just as Don Revie had left the most successful club in England to take on the national job.  Can you imagine a top class English manager (I know - it's a stretch of imagination) leaving Chelsea or Man Utd to take on the England job today?

[acko]

one of the big problems with england is they are miles behind when it comes to preporation with only 6 months to go. what system we are happy with gerrmany,spain,france and brazil are miles in front of us.in the final year we are still experimenting with players what are certainly not good enough yet to play for england southgate is weak and cant even name the captain.Way things are going we will be doing a Scotland  home before tournement has started

[DonnyOsmond]

Maybe if they played abroad they wouldn't have these issues of the us v them mentality.

[Copps is Magic]

snip

Incredibly dismissive view.

At no point did I get any sense they were making excuses. It actually seemed a quite candid, honest conversation. What motivation they would have for publicly admitting they didn't get on, I don't quite know.

If you bothered to watch beyond 4 minutes you'd hear Gerrard talking about how, in his own opinion, he never performed to his full potential for England, and its implicit in the comments the other two make. Are you honestly suggesting that those three players, 3 champions league wins between them, were not of a world class standard standard at the time?

[BillyStubbsTears]

What motivation?

The obvious one. The need to find an explanation to themselves and the world why an over-hyped generation of players consistently failed at the highest level.

Look at what I wrote instead of getting arsey. There’s a logical inconsistency in the first 4 minutes of the “explanation”.

Occam’s Razor for me. If the nation’s players consistently does less well than we and they expect them to do, over a period of 20 years, regardless of management system, the obvious reason is that the players are actually not as good as we and they thought they were.

Regarding the ability of the players you mention, my take on this for some time now is that we produce players who can do a job that is drilled into them at club level, but don’t have the nous to work in unfamiliar circumstances in the limited time available to them in the national team setting. That lack of flexible football intelligence screams out every time we see England in a major finals. That’s the very best that we produce. Below them is a cadre if players who are not remotely as good as we big them up to be.

PS: On the subject of English football people making excuses for not being as good as those from overseas, there’s just been a gem on R5 from Pardew. “I think English managers get more criticism because we speak a lot so we give a lot of opportunity to criticise us. Foreign managers can get away with coming to the press conference, saying, “Aahhh, we play bad” and leaving.”

And he’s about the best we’ve produced in the past 20 years. God f**king help us.

[Copps is Magic]

Regarding the ability of the players you mention, my take on this for some time now is that we produce players who can do a job that is drilled into them at club level, but don’t have the nous to work in unfamiliar circumstances in the limited time available to them in the national team setting. That lack of flexible football intelligence screams out every time we see England in a major finals. That’s the very best that we produce. Below them is a cadre if players who are not remotely as good as we big them up to be.

Which, if you did pay attention, is exactly what they said in the video. That's why dismissing it like you did is even more bizarre.

[DonnyOsmond]

He's the best? I'd put Allardyce above him and potentially Dyche and Howe.

[Copps is Magic]

If you want an example of how the dominance of the PL has skewed priorities over the years, think about how embittered Clough was never to get the chance to manage England. He was the pre-eminent club manager of his era. But he would have dropped any club he was at to manage England. Just as Don Revie had left the most successful club in England to take on the national job.  Can you imagine a top class English manager (I know - it's a stretch of imagination) leaving Chelsea or Man Utd to take on the England job today?

I make it only one permanent English manager at any of the big 4 English clubs in the last 20 years (Roy Evans at Liverpool). More than a stretch that example. Maybe its a bigger indication of the development the premiership has had on producing top class English coaching, not players.

[RedJ]

Are we forgetting Hodgson's tenure at Liverpool?

[Copps is Magic]

Yes, to be fair, I am. I was working off the top of my head.

Not sure Roy adds much weight to the example though.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Copps

My apologies. As I said, I lost interest after 4 minutes. If they’d started off saying “Yeah, we did alright at club level but when asked to perform for country we were as flexible as an RSJ cast in concrete” instead of some cock and bull story about not talking to their old mates I’d  have been rapt.

I’ll go back and watch the rest when I’ve got a minute.

[BillyStubbsTears]

If you want an example of how the dominance of the PL has skewed priorities over the years, think about how embittered Clough was never to get the chance to manage England. He was the pre-eminent club manager of his era. But he would have dropped any club he was at to manage England. Just as Don Revie had left the most successful club in England to take on the national job.  Can you imagine a top class English manager (I know - it's a stretch of imagination) leaving Chelsea or Man Utd to take on the England job today?

I make it only one permanent English manager at any of the big 4 English clubs in the last 20 years (Roy Evans at Liverpool). More than a stretch that example. Maybe its a bigger indication of the development the premiership has had on producing top class English coaching, not players.

The flip side of the coin I was describing above. We don’t produce players with flexible football intelligence. We don’t produce managers with flexible football intelligence.

[BillyStubbsTears]

He's the best? I'd put Allardyce above him and potentially Dyche and Howe.

I said “about the best”. We’ve produced hundreds of managers over the past 20 years. His record is probably in the top 4 or 5 of those. Which is quite depressing if you think about it.

[Chris Black come back]

One point illustrated no better than “Lamps” and “Stevie G” is the continuing inabiiity to put out a TEAM of players, rather than the best XI players.

Now I am not saying they should start or even play but folk like Delph, Livermore etc are not the best but they can give the team balance etc. For too long we push together our best XI players and then watch on in wonder as they collapse into the gutter like a jalopy with wheels only on one side.

If “Becks” or “Lamps” and their like need to be ditched for the greater good then get rid of the buggers. Get a team that works. Folk playing for Wales or Ulster are not patch on England players but they are a better team. That is what matters.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Copps

Right mate. I've now watched the video to the end and nowhere did I hear anyone say "We weren't intelligent and flexible enough as footballers to deal with the inevitable compromises that you have to make when playing international tournaments."

I heard Gerrard, honestly say he rarely played as well for England as he did for Liverpool. But he also said that sometimes it was too hot.

And I heard all three of them spend far more time criticizing managers for not being good enough and discussing that bizarre "not speaking to our old mates" theory.

And I also heard one of them make the quite bizarre claim that in Lampard, Gerrard, Beckham, Scholes and Hargreaves, we had "the best midfield players in the world".

Really? Apart from the fact that it was rare that any four of those players played together

Better than the Brazil midfield which beat England in 2002?
Rivaldo, Ronaldinho, Gilberto Silva, Kleberson and Cafu & Roberto Carlos as de facto wingers

Better than Ronaldo, Luis Figo and Deco for Portugal in 2004?

Better than the French midfield in 2006?
Vierra, Makalele, Ribery and Zidane

Better than Sergio Busquets, Xabi Alonso, Xavi and Iniesta for Spain in 2010?

As I say, we've made a habit out of bigging up our players to be better than they actually are, then finding excuses for them when they fail. So I think I'll stand by my initial take.

[anne honemous]

I don't particularly buy into this.

England's squad at World Cup 2006 was pretty much made up of players playing for clubs in this country, with the exception of Owen Hargreaves.

Italy's squad at the same tournament was made up of players playing entirely in Serie A - and they went and won the tournament.

It's entirely possible that the Italians had a much better bond in their squad but the reason England didn't win anything, at this tournament or any others, was because they weren't good enough.

The players also weren't as good as what they thought they were on an individual level as well.

[Bentley Bullet]

It's because we're English, and we're supposed to be the best. That's how we've been brought up.

Then we've got the press getting great pleasure in telling us differently. They love us to lose and put pressure on our sportspeople in any way they can. They love upstart triers like David Beckham, Frank Bruno and Steve Davis but hate them to be successful.

Even when we do get a world Champion, they get pulled down, by them.

The sad bit is those members of the public who go along with it.

[Copps is Magic]

Not really sure where this point about public/personal expectations has even come from or why it even matters. BST is completely symptomatic of that above, a long and largely pointless exercise in trying to measure the quality of our players against, inevitably, his own opinion, against their opinions of themselves, against the wider public opinion, so on and so forth. It's the kind of thing I did in the playground as a kid with my sticker book.

The point is to understand why individually talented players, winning things at the pinnacle of club football, can regularly and, seemingly consistently, under-perform as a team (even by their own admissions). Three of the linchpins of that generation offer some insights in to why it might be the case (in an absolutely imperfect fashion because they're, errr, footballers not chemical engineers) and state regularly its not one single factor; but instead we as a football supporting species seemingly can't escape from our own pre-decided opinions that we drag around in the mud proudly when we think we've found something to support it.

There's some incredible evidence out there to suggest that if you get 11 players playing as a team you might do a bit well.

[Bentley Bullet]

See post 23.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Copps.

Of course public expectations matter. The economics of English football is predicated on it. If we ever faced up to the fact that our cherubs are actually not THAT good, the whole Murdoch-built edifice would come crashing down.

And yes, you're right that arguably the three best players of their generation offering insights into their failures ought to be interesting. But it wasn't. It was the same tired old excuses and logically inconsistent new ones.

Which, as I said, leaves me thinking that the original assessment that our best are really not that good is probably the real explanation.

PS: The chemical engineers I know aren't really that perfect either.

[BillyStubbsTears]

BB:
We've had this chat before. Why do you think "The Press" does it?

It's in their interests to build folk up and knock folk down. Both aspects encourage people to engage. And that engagement sells papers.

And it gets amplified when the biggest paper magnate effectively buys English football.

I'm with you brother. I want to see us produce players and teams who can take on the world. But we will not while ever it's in the interests of the paymaster to hype up the second rate then slag them off for being second rate.

[Bentley Bullet]

So what do we do then Billy, seriously?

[BillyStubbsTears]

f**k knows BB.

I've tried to start by not buying into the whole PL/England team hype. But it's a lonely job.