What August means...an ode to football

The start of a new European club season always brings about a sense of renewal and excitement that is rarely rivialed in world sport. Fans forget the bickering over match fixing allegations, the wild and ridiculous transfer rumors, the long some time painful to watch overseas tours and just get down to watching their club for the next 9 months. The glitter than comes with watching the big new signing at your club shine on their debut, or finally seeing your club make the top flight is something that has always intrigued me. It's one of the few times that everyone has the small, if even slightly out to lunch hope that this is truly "Our year".

For the football junkies like myself this time of year means synchronizing watches and re-learning the different world time zones. It means no more sleeping in on the weekends, no quiet Saturday and Sundays, and no more "hey what you doing" calls during normal game time (Sorry ladies).  The weekends in August bring us the delights of French football, the pace and power from England, the beauty of the Spanish game and the tactical brilliant of Italy and Germany.At times it means that a football supporter has to make difficult decisions like which game to leave behind, which games to put your faith in and how much Arabic you know so you can watch your favorite match online if you can't get it on T.V where you are.

From a North American perspective, August is football dream land. Not only are the European Leagues getting started, but MLS is going into the playoff stretch drive. All the games in April and May no one though important, now become huge as team scrap for every last point to get themselves a shot at a league championship. At any given time one can watch football on a Saturday from 7:30 am -10 pm at night. And that does not include if you want to watch a west coast game which could be done at 1am the next morning!

To Man U, Arsenal and hell even Man City too. Lazio, Parma, Roma and Inter. From Wolfsburg to Bayern, PSG to Barca, from the 85,000 at the Santiago Bernabeu to the 2,500 in Frisco, Texas who watch FC Dallas. Enjoy, revel the best football months are back! and not a moment too soon.

Cheers,
Mike

A long way to go for England's young players

The first half of 2010 has been up and down for the various levels of the England squad. This summer's latest venture to the World Cup produced another disappointing result as the senior team crashed out to a young rebuilding Germany squad. An up is the fact that the U-17 squad won the European Championship earlier this summer. However things were brought down a bit by England's U-19 team being handily beaten by Spain 3-1 in yesterday's U-19 European championships. Since the senior squad returned home from South Africa, many have begun to ask the question, why hasn't the relative success of the junior levels translated to the senior level?

Pundits and experts alike have pointed to the level of coaching, suggesting that the England youth set up is not developing the proper skills to compete on the senior level. Others have blamed the the lack of funds provided by the F.A to a national training center, like Clairefontaine in France or The national center in Germany. Only recently has the F.A been able to agree on building a proper one in England. There is no doubt that both these issues have a hand in the lack of senior success for England, but the key to this lies at the feet of the club teams, especially the Premier League clubs.

The last player census taken for the EPL indicated that just over 60% of the players in the league were foreign. This is in stark contrast to the EPL's continential rivals like Spain, Germany or Italy who were in the range of 25% and 40%. In the league of the newly crowned world champions the "unofficial" rule is that at least 60% of the squad composition must be of Spanish players. There is also a culture of promoting players from the youth academies to the first team on a consistent basis. These type of "unofficial" rules are not applied in the EPL, where the big four teams tend to field few English born players and treat their academies as player cash farms, where you grow players just to sell them for profit. Manchester United and Chelsea have long been accused of doing this and recently Liverpool has picked up the practice. At Arsenal Arsène Wenger consistently puts out starting 11's that contain not one single English player.

The arguments from some of the clubs is that young English talent does not measure up to foreign talent, and that they are in the business of winning and not necessarily improving the English national squad. The clubs say the F.A should be in charge of the development of youth players, but the F.A counters that the clubs should as they have more time with the players. This type of mentality from the club side has lead them to be dependant on buying foreign talent at the expense of young English academy players, and it is here where the disconnect between the junior and senior levels can be found.

At 18 youths can sign pro contracts but aside from the phenoms like Wayne Rooney, and Theo Walcott, most end up having to battle several mature foreign players just to see time with the first team. Danny Welbeck, Frank Nouble etc all could be good enough to see time with the first time had it not been for the purchase of foreign talent at their positions. This is not to say that all EPL clubs are practicing this, Everton, Tottenham and Aston Villa have been giving English talent a chance to develop with first team action, but at times this has been out of a cost cutting necessity more than anything.

If England wants to push quality talent on to the the senior level, they need to seriously look at how they can implement more English talent at the top flight. Germany has required that at least 12 players on a squad be "home grown" players and eligible to play for the German national team. The EPL is implementing a "home grown" player rule this year in which you must field 8 players that fit this label. However the rule has one massive loop hole, that home grown player does not have to be English. If the player has been trained in the club academy for over three years under the age of 21 they are considered home grown. For example Arsenal midfielder Cesc Fabregas who is Spanish counts as a home grown player; He has been training at Arsenal since he was 17. In all the rule will help the other clubs outside the big four bring up English players, but this still does not stop the club from filling out the rest of the 23 man roster with matured foreign players.

What club teams must come to understand is that the success of a domestic league will always depend on the strength of the domestic players. The EPL has been riding its luck on being able to attract foreign stars with the vast amount of money available to most clubs, but to be able to sustain itself long term the league must produce more English talent for the national teams. Or face a potential Spanish and German domination of Europe for a while to come.

Dan Roan wrote an excellent blog post about this for BBC Sport, and must read of England supporters.

Cheers,

Mike

Round of 16 thoughts so far

As I was out with family yesterday I only had the opportunity to see bits and pieces of the two games, because of this is I will not be offering an opinion on the two games. All I can really say about them is congrats to Uruguay and Ghana, two teams I did not have making it this far. If you had the opportunity to watch them let me know what you though of the games, especially the Ghana v USA match, I heard it ended up a classic.

As for day two of the round of 16 your intrepid footy analyst was back on the couch watching England v Germany and then the sexy match up of today, the rematch of the best match in the 2006 tournament Argentina v Mexico.

Germany 4 England 1: (Germany advance to quarter finals)
This was pretty much the worst case scenario for both teams coming into the round of 16 as neither really wanted this match up as early as this. Especially England who had hoped to finish first in their group and avoid this hard of a game. Now I must admit that I have a soft spot for England and was hoping for a victory from the the Three Lions, because of this I watched the game again taking my bias out of it. Once I did that it was clear that Germany were the better side on the day. Yes the Lampard goal that was ruled no goal was absolutely one of the worst calls I have ever seen in a World Cup, and yes it may have changed the complexion of the game a bit. However the match was not lost on that call really, it was actually lost in two key areas, tactics set up by manager Fabio Capello, and defensive play. I will go about trying to explain how this was.

First Capello's tactics in this game weren't horrible, but they were misguided against a strong squad like Germany. The squad lacked ideas and many times were very narrow in attack. England's best chances, and the goal scored were set up on wide play from James Milner. When the team was narrow it was easy for Germany to close down on Rooney and Defoe, which in turn made the link up play ineffective. Also when you cannot spread the field you leave yourself open for counter attacks which three of Germany's four goals were scored on. In this, all credit must go to Germany who countered brilliantly mainly through Mesut Özil who again is proving to be the young player of the tournament so far. When the German manager moved him a bit more to the right after half time, Özil was able to take advantage of the space left by the advancing England right back Glenn Johnson.

Speaking of the defensive backs, they did not have a great day, John Terry and Matthew Upson in particular. On the first goal by Klose, Terry uncharacteristically misplayed he flight of the ball which allowed Klose to walk in the back door. Upson ended up being out muscled by Klose for the goal. On the second goal it was a combination of excellent German movement and sloppy coverage by Terry and Johnson left Lukas Podolski wide open on the left wing to score.

I know this will not sit well with the England supporters, many will use the disallowed goal as a rallying point to say that England were robbed. I agree with them; England was robbed of THAT goal, but not of the match. Not enough credit is being given to Germany who yes rode of bit of luck but who overall were the better team on the day, and they outclassed England. To read another point of view on England's world cup proformance read BBC chief football writer Phil McNulty's assesment (Click on his name)

Argentina 3 Mexico 1: (Argentina advances to quarter finals)
This was to be the sexy match up of the day as both teams liked moving forward. The first 10 minutes provided just that, with Mexico holding the majority of the play at the time....then controversy hit again. Carlos Tevez scored on a flicked header off floated shot by Messi. The issue was that Tevez was quite clearly offside. After some confusion between the ref and the line judge the goal stood. Mexican players complained for a good two minutes and pretty much lost their head after that. Argentina took over the match at that point, plus it didn't he;p that the Mexican defence handed Argentina the second goal on a poor back pass by the defender.

Overall Argentina bossed the game and until the last 10 mins looked like they could really run up the score on Mexico. By the way if you get to watch a replay of the game, Tevez's second goal which made it 3-0 was a lazer, and Henandez's goal that made it 3-1 was a lesson on how to turn a defender. My one criticism of the game would be Argentina's lack of zest going forward at about the 75 minute mark. This seemed to coincide with the substitution of Carlos Tevez who provided alot of the spark and work rate upfront. Never the less Argentina manager Diego Maradona seems to have pulled off another managerial master class in planning and tactics....yes I said it.

Looking forward to the rest of the week! Let me know what you think will happen or on any of the games from this weekend.

Cheers,
Mike