Joe Allen [Sold]

[Kenneth]

Well the Finns clearly appreciate the nuances of invisible tika-taka.

[el matador]

The whole thing about asians in football has been talked about for ages.

Some of the guys I play footy with are ex bradford city lads and they are quality players and some of them are asian. some of them reckon theres a hidden agenda against asian players but imo thats bull****.

Clubs like bradford city dont give a **** about what colour you are. All they care about is players who fit their ideal profile. They are renowned for taking bruisers who will get stuck in and run all day but generally speaking they wont take on very skilful young players.

My guess is that there are a couple of reasona for this. Firstl the league they are in requires scrappers and not highly technical head up type players. Secondly all youth playera development is very unpredictable but especially so for technical players.

Thats probably why they choose solid quick physically strong all round players with decent technical ability but not exceptionally skilful ones.

When it comes down to it asian players are technically good and very skilful but once you get to open age and theyre playing against men its no contest. They get bullied off the ball constantly and find it difficult to show their quality.

Before anyone says anything about me being racist im indian.

[Kenneth]

Why aren't there many asian scrappers then?

[el matador]

We've all read Gladwell.

What he goes on to say is that because the bigger boys (IIRC he was talking about ice hockey, but it applies to football too) are favoured, they get more coaching, are more likely to be picked and so are more likely to stick at it (positive reinforcement) so that pretty quickly they are better than the smaller ones who get left behind.

The gap though is that if the smaller ones hadn't been disadvantaged by the way the system works then the best players would have ended up better than the ones who currently come through, because the pool of development talent (which does not correlate to what month your born in) wouldn't have been filtered by what size you are (which does, until you're fully grown).

Sorry mate I dont know who gladwell is but I guess all youth sports are the same. But a study was done of pro academies in the uk and the first teams were all dominated by september to december kids.

This was also very true in our team with nine out of the 12 players were born between sept and dec. The only exception were three lads who all happened to be the most skillful players in the team and were all may to august births.

[el matador]

Why aren't there many asian scrappers then?

Too small I guess and probably not equipped physically for the job.

I played in a birmingham tournament once and we played against all the local brum teams that werw dominated by black players. I remember being thrashed by this team of rastafarians and they didnt give us a kick. Every single one was over six foot and could do the 100m run in probably 11 ish seconds.

We had one lad that was six three tall and just as wide. Other than than the average height was about 5 8'.

We got mullered.

[Kenneth]

Aye, I guess that could well be a factor, yes.

[CJ]

What about Jan to April births

[CJ]

Is el matador Russell Grant

[little dave hedgehog]

What about Jan to April births

they play cricket.

[CJ]

I played a bit of cricket but was crap

[Kenneth]

They're clearly too young for competitive sport.

[CJ]

So at 110 Neil young is too young for competitive sport

[Kenneth]

I played a bit of cricket but was crap

Lancastrian, what do you expect?

[CJ]

Lancastrian, what do you expect?

We won the county championship last year

[Neil Young]

Sorry mate I dont know who gladwell is but I guess all youth sports are the same. But a study was done of pro academies in the uk and the first teams were all dominated by september to december kids.

This was also very true in our team with nine out of the 12 players were born between sept and dec. The only exception were three lads who all happened to be the most skillful players in the team and were all may to august births.

http://www.arcticicehockey.com/2008/12/malcolm-gladwells-outliers-and-making.html

The point is the effects of birth month are cumulative. Otherwise it would all even out in time. Plus other effects - most notably early versus late onset of puberty - would swamp it, at least for a while.

I'm sure physical size has something - probably quite a lot - to do with it. But again I suggest there are other issues, particularly cultural ones, both to do with Asian communities and British society as a whole.