U21 Euro 2013 Tournament

[danperkins]

Isco is some player.. be interesting to see who gets him. Potential superstar

[Tee]

Isco is some player.. be interesting to see who gets him. Potential superstar

Yep. Tailor made for Barca but several clubs will be in the running. Out of our league though.....

[danperkins]

Yep. Tailor made for Barca but several clubs will be in the running. Out of our league though.....

Way out of our league, Thiago looks like a potential superstar too.

[Neil Young]

That would be pretty cynical. Somehow I don't see Pearce as thinking like that but you could be right.

I know we were poor at the tournament but up until then hasn't Pearce's record been pretty good? Capello was a good England manager (and has a fabulous record in management) but struggled to get anything out of the England team at the World Cup. Perhaps there is a deeper problem with the mentality of players developed in this country than can be solved by any international coach.

I don't think he calculates like that either. But it doesn't have to be a fully conscious process.

I don't think mentality is really the issue. I think the players aren't technically and tactically good enough.

Did you hear Rafael's (it may have been Fabio) comment about Brazil? If England's players think there's a weight of expectation when playing for their country, it's nothing compared to what it's like to be picked for Brazil.

I'd never really thought about it before but that must be right. I'm sure it's the same for Germany or Italy or Argentina. But, in general, they cope.

[peekay]

But England Were Never Any Good...
Everybody is queuing up to discuss the root cause of England's malaise at senior and Under-21 level but they're ignoring something massive: We were never any good.

England's Under-21 team got in some useful practice at being outplayed and eliminated early in a European tournament this weekend. It will surely stand them in good stead for when some of them play in the senior side.

As is de rigueur on such occasions, the English football cognoscenti of ex-managers, ex-players and journalists with little else to do at the moment, all went into full 'something must be done' hand-wringing mode about the poor performance of this England side, just as it had recently done about Roy Hodgson's team.

The problem with such post-England defeat blarting is that so much of it is based on the idea that England were once really good and that the past was somehow better than the present. This has always happened but it's never been true.

It's no use Graham Taylor saying: "I think we have all seen this coming. We have got this tremendous amount of money that has now come into football. It means the top four or five clubs are not looking for the best players in England, but the best players in the world because they can afford to buy them."

Ah yes because when this wasn't the case, such as when you, Graham Taylor, were England manager, England were still no better than just alright and often downright poor. You won nothing, you were never near winning anything, yet you had an entire league of Englishmen to choose from.

Equally, it's no use FA honcho David Bernstein saying there is a 'desperate' need to increase the amount of English players in the Premier League. In the 1970s, when the only foreign imports into our leagues came from Scotland or Wales or the Irelands, England failed to qualify for anything for 12 years. Lack of players to choose from might look like the problem but any cursory knowledge of history proves it is otherwise.

It's no use Sol Campbell, another England stalwart who never came close to winning anything internationally, saying:

"With the Under-21s and football in general in England I honestly feel that the quality has gone down."

Gone down compared to when, Sol? Because when you played ten times for the U-21s between 1994 and 1996, you didn't even qualify for the tournament. At least this current crop managed to do that.

But there's the problem, the past is always better than the present, isn't it? Time and again we hear players talking about what it was like 'in my day' as though their day had delivered anything other than the same degree of failure.

It's no use Phil Neville, a man of great international pedigree but absolutely never near ever winning anything with England, saying: "My biggest learning was between 18 and 21. I don't see the lads now getting the chance until they are 21, so they've missed out on three years' football. The biggest thing is to get the players playing regularly."

This might sound eminently sensible, except that when this wasn't the case, when most sides were full of Englishmen of all ages, England were still either just alright or pretty poor. Phil isn't stupid, he must know this, so why is he saying it?

I know I'm repeating myself here but it needs to be asserted loud and often that we have not fallen from the lofty peak of yesteryear. We've not gone backwards due to English kids being excluded or slowed down by overseas talent; by and large we've remained in the same bracket of quality and achievement throughout every post-war era.

But to the ex-pro or the old journo it seems the past was always a better time. In their day England were world beaters. Don't you remember that? Back when it wasn't now.

Here's the truth: England has never been a very good football team for more than the occasional game both pre and post-1966. Our World Cup victory can be seen as a nothing but a short six-game blip in a long history of mediocrity and we even needed a dodgy goal to win that.

All the ex-pros have no solutions to offer because they were part of the problem too. They might want to project their time as somehow superior but they all lost. They all left the stadiums of the world with heads down, a defeat in their guts. And yet they always seem to think they've spotted where we are going wrong, just as when they were players, ex-pros knew where they were going wrong. Everyone has always known where we're going wrong, but still, we go wrong. This must obviously be because they don't really know anything and they never have.

People have always wanted to know who is to blame for England. Variously across the decades it's been the English manager, the foreign manager, the coaching, the pitches, the tactics, the weather, the foreigners, injuries, fitness, our schools, our kids, our parents, our popular culture, our drink culture. Everything has had a finger pointed in its direction.

But the fact is, while our culture, society and our football has changed a lot in the last 60 years and all the scapegoats have been addressed in one way or another, England's results haven't really changed much. While other countries have periods of success and dominance, England never does. We're resolutely unexceptional. Not really bad, never really good.

It is this fact that undermines every single critic who points to any changes in modern football as the problem. Only if England had ever been truly great could we point to changes from those halcyon days as the reasons for our fall from grace. To hear ex-managers and ex-players complaining that things ain't what they used to be requires a total mind wipe and the construction of an alternate reality where Carlton Palmer held the World Cup aloft and Phil Neville didn't clumsily hack Viorel Moldovan down to concede a tournament-eliminating penalty.

Maybe the only thing that hasn't been addressed over the years is what a negative influence ex-players and managers have on the England team with their misguided, deluded attitudes about England and what it expects. The demands on England players are great even though they have almost nothing to live up to.

In an interview this weekend, Tom Ince, who played an underwhelming game for the U21s against Norway, said this of his father, Paul, an England player with plenty of commitment to the cause and who never came close to winning anything internationally: "If I had a bad game he would be spitting in my face and worse than that!"

Presumably, this was back in the day when spitting in a child's face was universally recognised as a positive motivation tool. Dig underneath that disturbing and unhygienic statement and maybe we can begin to find the psychological root cause of England's problem. But maybe that's too hard to do, much better to retreat into blind nostalgia for the good old days, the good old days which never were.

http://www.football365.com/john-nich...Never-Any-Good...

[Shaggy]

Isco is just too good

[ame]http://youtu.be/BddDvoJ84sk[/ame]

[Fredo]

Does Suso play for the Spanish national team (whatever age level he's in)?

[Shaggy]

Yep he's in the squad for this summer's U20 World Cup.

Luis Alberto, incidentally, isn't.

[Fredo]

Yep he's in the squad for this summer's U20 World Cup.

Luis Alberto, incidentally, isn't.

Weird that and he'll probably be ahead of Suso in the pecking order.

[Shaggy]

Weird that and he'll probably be ahead of Suso in the pecking order.

I've been getting pretty excited about Luis Alberto but it makes you wonder

FWIW this is the Spain U20 squad.

ATHLETIC CLUB: Ager Aketxe Barrutia & Kepa Arrizabalaga Revuelta
C. ATº DE MADRID S.A.D: Saúl Ñíguez Esclapez, Javier Manquillo Gaitán & Oliver Torres Muñoz
F.C. BARCELONA: Gerard Deulofeu Lázaro
R.C. CELTA DE VIGO SAD: Jonatan Castro Otto
GETAFE C.F. SAD: Francisco Alcácer García
LEVANTE U.D. SAD: Rubén García Santos
LIVERPOOL F.C.: Jesús Joaquín Fernández Sáenz de la Torre “Suso”
MANCHESTER CITY F.C.: Denis Suárez Fernández
REAL MADRID C.F.: Diego Javier Llorente Ríos, Derik Osede Prieto & Jesé Rodríguez Ruiz
REAL RACING CLUB S.A.D.: Daniel Sotres Castañeda & Jairo Samperio Bustera
SEVILLA F.C. S.A.D.: Israel Puerto Pineda & José Gómez Campaña
VALENCIA C.F. S.A.D.: José Luis Gaya Peña & Juan Bernat Velasco
VILLARREAL C.F. S.A.D.: Adrián Ortolá Vaño

[marcus50bucks]

Morata continues to impress me. He won't get a chance at Madrid.

[Shaggy]

Cracking goal Borini. 1-0 Italy.

[Daffy Duck]

Wooo Il Piratto

[Daffy Duck]

I just made that up, does he have an actual nickname?

[Shaggy]

Italy through to the final. That is one snide Italian team.