Cycling and rowing are our best sports because they're the ones we're successful in. Heaven knows we have precious else to be proud of on the sports field. Track and field will take centre stage at the Olympics and no doubt you'll hear many suggesting the British team lacks hunger because they're given too much too soon without having to earn it.
How many times does the same story have to be told before it sinks in? It has nothing to do with patriotism, it's about wanting to be the very best. We havn't won anything in nearly 50 years, with 2/3 of that period coinciding with a time when there were next to no foreign players in the league. There has to come a time when we accept that the way we coach young players simply isn't good enough.
I enjoy watching English success but I'm not blinkered enough to overlook our failings. When our rugby team could go to the southern hemishphere and beat all comers it was wonderful. Now we go down there and get thrashed. Is that something to be proud of? When the cricket team won the Ashes it was the culmination of a fabulous few years of form and it was a great summer. Now we're horribly inconsistent. Do you spot a trend here? We appear so starved of success in this country that whenever we achieve some we go so overboard that our athletes lose any hunger. I know a few Australians and they laugh at us. Success to them is prolonged, year after year after year. The odd win here and there isn't good enough for them.
And this applies just as well to football. Spanish and Argentine teams have dominated youth football tournaments in the past decade. Since 1990 the only teams that have won the World Youth Cup have been Spain, Portugal, Brazil and Argentina. In that same period we've qualified for just 5 of the 9 tournaments, we finished bottom of our group twice out of those 5 with a best performance in 1993 when we reached the semi final. We failed to qualify for the last tournament. So yes, forgive me if I think our youth development is a poor relation internationally.
And what do our kids do about it? Sure there are lots of foreign players in this country. Big deal. Kids in other countries grow up with far more hardships than that to contend with and manage to make it. I wonder how hard some of our African lads had to work as kids when they were growing up. We've certainly had a few in our time. The likes of Jeffers and Cadamarteri spring to mind. Both could have been fine players with some dedication, but both ended up lost to the game.
I don't particularly enjoy watching the England team play but that's not because of any anti patriotism, it's simply because I'm a football fan, and the number of good performances by England in the past decade can be counted on one hand. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the Euros and some of the performances by Spain, Holland and Russia are far away from anything England could produce. I doubt half of that Spanish team would have got a look in at an English youth side because they'd be too small.
Wenger has it spot on here. Lets look a bit less at what's on someones passport and look more at what they have in their feet and in their head. If we want English players to be represented then we have to make them better. All evidence thus far says they simply aren't good enough. If you think it's a problem with foreign coaches perhaps this quote from Harry Redknapp will open some eyes.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml?xml=/sport/2008/06/01/ufnpompey101.xml
He added: "You get these 16-year-olds who think they have cracked it and aren't prepared to work and improve and put the hours in. You don't get that with the foreign lads."
Time to get real.
