English Football. (long)

[Hacked!]

Load of rubbish that english players aren't 'techincally skillfull' and all that rubbish. Steven Gerrard, for example, must score a dozen 40-yarders every season and inspired a FA Cup final and pretty much a CL Final win on his own, if hes not techincally skillfull then i dont care for a technically skillful player! The PL is a great league for entertainment and Arsenal play some awesome stuff, probably the best at the minute but remember they are as spiteful as they come when its not going their own way... all the way back to the viera and keown era.

Also, the only reason why England as a whole are rubbish at the minute is down to poor management and motivation. Look at scotland nobody could ever claim they are a great side but they WANT it at the minute.

Motivation biggest factor in top level modern football IMO.

[Disturbance]

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Theres not one player on the planet as technically gifted playing today as paul scholes,

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W T F??

The ginger prince is good but your statement is laughable IMO. Scoring the odd volley from outside the box does not make him the most technically gifted player in the world. I don't think he is even the best technical English player, Joe Cole is.

[Disturbance]

Gerrard has never scored 12 league goals in a season let alone 12 from 40 yards. He is a good player but you are seriously overrating him, his biggest strength is his workrate. He is not even the best passer at Liverpool, Alonso runs rings around him in that dept.

[The_Dealor]

i dont even think joe cole is most technically gifted english player, probably rooney. i think joe cole is over rated, he does a few step overs and mostly loses the ball. granted he makes a few good oppurtunities and often a goal comes from it.

i think xabi alonso is awesome and he could fit in to the arsenal game, think he would sit perfect in the middle where flamini is playing atm

[Disturbance]

[ QUOTE ]
i dont even think joe cole is most technically gifted english player, probably rooney. i think joe cole is over rated, he does a few step overs and mostly loses the ball. granted he makes a few good oppurtunities and often a goal comes from it.



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Hmmm, I still think Cole is better technically than Rooney although he needs to play in his best position which would be in CM or just off the striker as he is not a winger. Regardless of that I think this is a great thread with some interesting opinions [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[The_Dealor]

i remember when joe cole first burst onto the scene at west ham. they played man utd at old trafford, and joe cole totally abused roy keane all game. the press the next day were building joe cole up to be amazing.

then he goes to chelsea and they play him on the wing. plays ther for england aswell. makes no sense whatsoever, its just so they can fit another celeb player in the team rather than picking the 11 that will play the best football.

[ThaSaltCracka]

Talking about why he liked Liam Brady, Nick Hornby says he was the last passer Arsenal had(of course he wrote this before they had Bergkamp and Cesc). He is saddened by this and comments as follows (exact quote):

"It might surprise those who have a rudimentary grasp of the rules of the game to learn that a First Division football team can try to play football without a player who can pass the ball, but it not longer surprises the rest of us: passing went out of fashion just after silk scarves and just before inflatable bananas. Managers, coaches and therefor players now favour alternative methods of moving the ball from one part of the field to another, the chief of which is a sort of wall of muscle strung across the half-way line in order to deflect the ball in the general direction of the forwards. Most, indeed all, football fans regret this. I think I speak for all of us when I say that we used to like passing, that we felt that on the whole it was a good thing. It was nice to watch, football's prettiest accessory (a good player would pass to a team-mate we hadn't seen, or find an angle we wouldn't have thought of, so there was a pleasing geometry to it), but managers seemed to feel that it was a lot of trouble, and therefor stopped bothering to produce and players who could do it. There are still a couple of passers in England, but then, there are still a number of blacksmiths."

This was written in 1992. Does it still ring true or was Hornby off base from the beginning?

[KDawg]

TSC, hornby wrote that when the old cat call was, boring boring aresenal. This was very true of aresenal til Wenger got there

[ThaSaltCracka]

I realize that, I am curious if his statement is accurate about English players and the English game.

[AJW]

Shortly after English teams were banded from Europe a report was published that included a statistical brake down of how goals were scored one of its finding was that most goals came at the end of move of no more then three or four passes and that set pieces where the most effective way of scoring. A number of Managers adopted a strategy of getting the ball forward with the fewest possible passes Arsenal won the league with some very direct football Wimbledon punched above their weight for more then a decade with even less attractive football Gary linker famously said “The best place to watch Wimbledon F.C. is teletext”
The European ban also saw the best English players moving abroad and delayed the influx of foreign talent so managers didn’t have the best technical players available to them and had to adapt their plans accordingly.
There were some good even great passers about, Sheridan, Molby and McAllister all spring to mind but overall Hornby is telling the truth.