How far behind have we fallen with the national team......

It's pathetic and i wouldn't be surprised if Scotland beat us!

Look at the strikers

Lambert
Defoe
Rooney
Welbeck

None of these would get a look in going back 10 15 yeas when we had decent home grown strikers

Shearer
Fowler
Cole
Sheringham
Wright
Ferdinand

And I'm sure there's a few I've not mentioned that would walk into the team now. Sad that its got like this but were going backwards fast and until they put a cap on foreigners in youth academy's were only going to fall further behind.

 

Capping foreigners is only the start.

The English games rotten.

 

Footballs getting more expensive all the time and barely any gets put into grass roots to get kids playing and into a position where they can look at making a career out of it. We built that place in burton but what's the point if we aren't going to invest nationwide?

 

Have I told any one how Sky is ruining football...?

 

Kids don't play in the street any more I'm 23 and I honestly think I'm from the last generation of kids that used to play football on the street in an evening. If I go back to the road where I played growing up now there's not a kid in sight, probably all sat inside playing playstation or on the Internet, and then even if they came outside to play there's that many cars parked on the curbs the pitch is now effectively 4 ft wide. No wonder our national teams gone to pot. I'm sure any great English would confirm that when get where a kid they spent all there time outside playing the game and didnt just get that good from attending training. Practice makes perfect and unfortunately there's not many kids out there in this country practicing

 

The issue is the EPL controls everything and is only interested in its own gains.

 

Are kids allowed to play football in the streets anymore? Loads of signs around saying no ball games or miserable neighbours who scream at kids for walking past their houses

 

It's exactly the same for me. Our street used to be crawling with kids 'playing out' every night. Now I never see any ever.

 

We're down to only 27% English players in the Premier League and it drops every season, the only way England will ever win anything again is if we start playing naturalised foreign players which is not right I don't think.

 

I agree completely with the general sentiment of your post, but Defoe and Rooney wouldn't get a look in? Really? Without having checked their respective records, I'd guess that their England strike rates are well up there.

 

Maybe Rooney but he would have been a bench warmer if he had the players I compared him with.

 

Rooney - 36 in 83
Defoe - 19 in 54

Sheringham - 11 in 51 (don't get me wrong, a brilliant player but not an out and out goalscorer)
Ian Wright - 8 in 33 (including a hat-trick against someone rubbish)

Ferdinand 5 in 17, Welbeck 5 in 16 - pretty comparable

Of our more recent strikers, the one with easily the best goals per games ratio is Crouch with 22 in 42, but taking into account the amount of substitute appearances it works out as a goal every 99 minutes which is pretty impressive.

As I said, I agree with the sentiment entirely, but it's very easy to look back at certain players with rose tinted specs, whilst not giving some of the current crop the credit they deserve. I'm not a massive Welbeck fan by any stretch, but his goalscoring record for England is not at all bad.

 

I think more than looking at goals to game ratio I was trying to show more that we don't have the strength in depth we used to have and the current crop of internationals just don't seem as good as what we used to have coming through.

Our last great partnership was probably shearer and Owen and I just can't see where we are going to get another one from.

 

While ever the big clubs continue with their short term recruitment policies from abroad, I sadly have to agree with you on that front. It also doesn't help when no two strikers seem to be given an extended run in the side together. What works at club level doesn't always work at international level and vice-versa.

 

As an England football fan I jut feel let down by the fa letting it get to where we are.

 

The FA has always been crap and behind-the-times though, even as far back as the 1940s.

 

Where I live, someone moved into a house overlooked a popular, well-looked after, park aimed at smaller kids and then promptly tried everything they could to shut it....

 

I'm a firm believer in seeing some of our kids moving to clubs abroad to further their game like young Spanish, French and Dutch prospects are doing. We actually have some fantastic young players who have been shunted into the reserves of the MCFCs, Uniteds, Chelsea's and so on....

English football oozes pound signs for me, rather than class. Ok maybe that is harsh, it has some world class players but for me it's not the best league in the world, it's the most earning league in the world! We need to take note of what the Germans are doing and stop trying to fast track young talent into the England set up after one half decent performance.

Sturridge, Zaha, Jones, Wilshere and Hart are the only players for me that have come through in the last 4 or 5 seasons who seem to be for the international stage and I imagine alot of people will disagree about Sturridge and Zaha but they're now at clubs that can further that potential into real ability, but overall I think the national team will continue to slip at a drastic rate.

 

rooney is an amazing footballer