Terry Venables adds his tuppence-worth to the debate about foreign players in the Premiership:

“The academy system is something that hasn’t really borne fruit in the way we wished it did,” he said last night. “There are a lot of players coming from around the world, which makes it difficult for local boys.

When I was playing it was just Great Britain that clubs picked from. You had to be the best in Great Britain, which wasn’t easy. But today you’ve got to be the best in the world. If you want to be the best that is what you have got to be. Nevertheless it does have some restrictions that make it very difficult for more young players to progress.”

He’s referring to the football academies for young players at the Premiership clubs. These fill with young men from France, Spain, Africa, Italy, Portugal and Holland, leaving little room for our own young men at the country’s best training centres.

In other words, English players are having to rely increasingly on the facilities available at less wealthy, less well-endowed clubs, and aren’t necessarily getting access to the best training minds available. This has a knock-on effect later in the careers of English players and thus on the England team.

When we looked at this last week, we saw that fewer English boys were persisting with football per se, so the pool of available talent was shrinking before it gets to academy age. That, plus the innate advantages of Englishness in terms of language, relative lack of homesickness and culture clashes etc., made English players more expensive than foreign ones on the open market.

We can probably add to that what you might call the Wenger factors: foreign players are, on the whole, far more open to tactical discussion. On average, they possess better technical skills. They are unlikely to buy into any kind of youthful drinking culture. They are more likely to treat football as a serious career. There are English players aplenty in Arsenal Youth and Reserves; the first team sees only Walcott and Hoyte Senior.

By 2008, UEFA wants clubs in European competitions to have eight home-grown players - four developed at the specific club - in the 25-man squad as a condition of entry. When this idea was first mooted, only five of that season’s (2005-6) Champions League clubs would have struggled with the ruling. Which is good, except that four of the five were Arsenal, Chelsea, Celtic and Rangers (the other club was Ajax).

It’s worth noting that although our top clubs have continental players in their academies, the reverse is not true. There is no foreign legion of British players abroad.

The only solution that I can see to this threat to the future of the England team is grass roots - produce more and better players at 12 years of age. Fortunately, Simon Clifford hasn’t waited for the Football Association to deal with the problem:

Clifford’s problems with the perceived wisdom are numerous - out-dated coaching methods, too much focus on competition too young, not enough time spent on skills and many, many more - but can be condensed into one central tenet: our young players are not playing nearly enough of the right type of football.

Clifford is adamant that the best foreign players are “manufactured” and sees no reason why English youngsters cannot match their athleticism and skills, given the right amount of good coaching.

The BBC review the current situation in this article, from which I take the Clifford comments.

My personal take is that if we can get ages 0-12 right - and this goes for the other sports as well - then the rest will pretty much take care of itself. Make our own raw material better in terms of instinctive skill and attitude, things that can be coached and trained, and let the rest of the world try to keep up.

Start early enough, and there are the side benefits to consider too..

So how different is football from the pre-Great War game? I’ve mentioned before that the paucity and low quality of Edwardian film makes direct comparisons difficult. Contemporary eye witnesses provide some clues, but because relatively few people, even among the sports journalists of the day, travelled to see a wide variety of clubs, their opinions and comparisons can be invidious.

We are already aware of some fairly significant differences:

1. Management: The modern idea of the football manager simply didn’t exist in Edwardian England. The “secretary/manager” of the day was a kind of lower-class CEO acting as go-between for players and directors. Directors, secretary/manager and players all would have had some input into signings. Tactics, where these existed, were a matter for the players to work out between themselves - an attitude that still survives in underground form in today’s game.
2. Equipment: Although actual kit - shorts, socks and shirts - have changed relatively little since Edwardian days, changing in terms of style and choice of cloth only, boots are quite different. Whether this was an enormous handicap is open to doubt: Pele and Bobby Moore wore similar kit alongside e.g. Russell Osman for the film Escape to Victory, and seemed to cope with it very well. The ball was heavier, and liable to soak up water. A heavy ball might actually be more easy to manage in terms of close control than the modern lighter ball, and it’s interesting that Simon Clifford’s Brazilian Soccer Schools and the game of Futsal both favour heavier balls.
3. Rules: The offside law was stronger before 1925: 3 defending players had to be between the attacker and the goal line before the final ball was played. Although this militated against goalscoring, it encouraged clever, thoughtful passing play, something which seems to have degraded in England post-’25.

Here’s a snippet of action from the 1911 FA Cup Final, won by Bradford City over Newcastle United at Crystal Palace in front of a large, class-mixed crowd.

An unidentified Newcastle player sees an opponent preparing to tackle, and brings the ball neatly into the air, retaining control:

Turning his body away from his opponent, he continues - still running full out - but still in full control of the ball, which is now on the floor:

His opponent has been left for dead, and he looks up to see if he can make the pass:

He can, and releases the ball. Play has now moved to a different sector of the pitch, and both player and opponent move to follow:

(Pictures courtesy of Fremantle Media’s outstanding 7-DVD History of Football, which really should be in the possession of anyone reading here regularly.)

I was encouraged to find some of my own themes in an interview with Sir Clive Woodward’s colleague and mentor Humphrey Walters just before New Year. At least, I was encouraged to find one of my themes - that another, different one was confirmed by the interview is just downright depressing.

Over the course of the last year, I’ve come to realize that sport holds a different place in the national psyche in Britain than it does in Australia, Germany or the United States. In Britain, sport is still primarily fun, a distraction from the serious business of life. It’s something you can do at the weekend, or, if you don’t want to be quite that active, it acts as a kind of real-life soap opera, with colourful characters bouncing off each other week by week on the back pages of the newspapers. We become serious about sport when big competitions come around - our place in the Olympic medals table, our performance in the World Cups of football and rugby, mean a lot nationally when they are thrust before our attention. Once the circus has moved on, however, our attention is apt to wander. Walters says,

“If you sat down and studied what is going wrong with British sport you would find some very common traits,” he says. “The real problem is that we as a nation don’t know what we want to do in sport. Do we want to retain the public school mentality of ‘play up, play up and play the game’ or do we want to win?

“I’m not sure we’ve got over that hurdle yet and I’m not sure that the people who are running these sports really understand what professionalism is.”

I’m beginning to suspect that we do know what we want - and that the real answer might be Soap, rather than either of Walter’s alternatives of winning or Corinthianism.

Mr Walters, who has also advised several Premiership football clubs, says it is easy to despair at Britain’s sporting failures but much harder to find the solution. The biggest sin, however, is not to look for answers. “Winning businesses ask ‘why?’ all the time,” he says.

“That’s what happened at Marks and Spencer. Stuart Rose came in and he looked at every aspect of the business and asked: ‘Why do we do that?’ The problem with sport is that it is such a closed shop that people are suspicious of anybody who is not steeped in their sport.”

That’s an excellent one-line summary of the Woodward/Clifford experience at Southampton, professional football’s great missed opportunity of the last 12 months.

I’m not sure if I trust in his solution, however:

“I know where I would start,” he says. “Everybody talks about the Aussies, the New Zealanders and the South Africans and their winning mentality. Nobody sits down and figures out just what it is. So what I would do is commission a study to examine whether there is such a different mentality and, if so, what is it?

“I would ask questions like how is it formed? Does it begin in school? Is it because they have a chip on their shoulder? I’ve no idea, but it wouldn’t be difficult to find out. Then I would ask, what is our mentality?”

My problem with that is, who are you going to commission to undertake the study? It would have to be someone from outside Britain merely to avoid a “national curriculum” type situation, where the outcome mysteriously perpetuates the status quo contrary to all good intentions. Britain really, really does not understand where it is coming from on this, and the lack of perspective would be fatal. But would British sportspeople treat a study conducted by people from abroad with anything other than the usual reluctance and denial? And what if the study concludes that we actually prefer things this way - sport as Soap, sport as a place to escape the demands of being an intelligent nation, perpetuating the myth that “passion” and “inspiration” are the national traits and not pessimism, cynicism and weariness?

There’s more to this, of course, and read the whole interview, but this was depressing to see:

What irks Mr Walters is that much of the wisdom acquired during the Woodward reign at Twickenham is now being ignored. “It’s very important to examine success,” he says. “There was no proper debrief after winning the rugby World Cup. Reports were written but they didn’t ask for the view of some people on the bench, the groundsman, the bag man.

“Everybody looks at things differently and every view is just as important because it’s a game of inches. Everybody brings an inch. It’s about sticking them together.”

Mr Walters cites an example of how knowledge from the Woodward era has been jettisoned. “One of the things we did was to change our kit at half-time. Now it’s not happening, or at least some players do and some don’t.

Once the World Cup was won in 2003, all of that silly newfangled stuff could be pedalbinned so we could get back to the proper British values. With the consequent results. I’ve asked the question before, and it remains: what’s the real “bullshit” here - innovation that feeds into a World Cup win, or all the verbiage about “passion” and “inspiration” with all that goes with it?

UPDATE: see how many Britishisms you can find in this Guardian account of Ashton’s first England rugby squad!

A brief “links” post today, as busy between now and Monday morning.

The departures from Southampton of Rupert Lowe, Clive Woodward and Simon Clifford represent to me in stark form the present unwillingness of English club football to do what is necessary to bring the best out of our players and achieve what our national game is capable of. What could have been a story of rebirth and regeneration has become yet another tale of football’s version of the Old School Tie.

Simon Clifford tells his side of the story (Woodward hasn’t yet, and may not) in two Guardian articles this morning. Jeremy Wilson has done a good job of putting Clifford across here and here, although his reference to Humphrey Walters as a “motivational guru” is tiresome and another reflection of our game. For all that it bewails the loss of street football, in most important respects it refuses to leave the playground.

Over at the always superb Hobo Tread, here’s an account of Clifford’s non-league side, Garforth Town.

By way of contrast, the comments on this post of Tim Worstall’s aptly demonstrate what I’ve been saying about sport being the place where the English opt to be stupid. Woodward gets airily dismissed with a world-weary wave of a hand. How obvious it is, that Woodward is nothing but a bullshit merchant: all we need to do is stuff our players with raw steak, “motivate” them, and if all’s not well after that, there’ll always be a scapegoat for the clever people to stick pins into.

It’s going to be a bleak and unsuccessful few years in British sport. We just don’t seem to be aware that there’s a choice to make. Either accept that we care more about fun and entertainment than winning, in which case our John Smith advert phoney no-nonsense amateur hour approach will do, or accept that winning things on a regular basis involves a change in attitude and practice on a fundamental level. Every time we seem to be on the cusp of taking the second route, we come over all CAMRA. We’re doing it again, now. What makes people think it’s going to work this time?