Why England really lost at Sock-aa

LBR is unable to better the analysis of both Chris Waddle and Paul Mason.

Turn on Radio 5 and you will hear Waddle bemoan the structure and coaching of English Football from junior level to the higher echelons of the Premier League and the FA. He cites that having only one ex-pro in the FA, Trevor Brooking, as being symptomatic and a cause of the current national team’s malaise.

Mason’s view is on the BBC website and makes an interesting analogy with greedy bankers: (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2010/06/england_the_lehman_brothers_of.html). Here is a snippet:
“But if you look at what's wrong with English football it starts with the junior game, where there's a horrendously physical and low-skill philosophy preached; then, for some reason, all the clever people get weeded out by the club system so that the words "intelligent, inventive England player" are impossible to write; finally the money pouring into the English premiership in the form of leveraged club buyouts allows club managers to buy their way out of having to train and develop English talent and we only find out once every four years what is wrong.
England's outstanding badness in World Cup 2010 must be a symptom of something bigger: the fact that we've got the most expensive, highest leveraged club system - and that none of our players play outside it - must have contributed to the weakening of commitment to the national colours, the evisceration of upcoming talent, the creation of an unmanageable team of frightened individuals, each of whom will now be dictating a valedictory ghost-written column to their chosen tabloid newspaper before getting on with life as a millionaire.
Like failed bankers they will pay no penalty for failure other than public opprobrium and, as everybody in high finance knows, you can live with that as long as you own a Lamborghini.
Basically, we've just seen the Lehman Brothers of football and it was not pretty.”

LBR agrees with both Waddle and Mason. Blame the manager, the ref or lack of technology if you want. But children playing football on full size pitches turn into pros that cannot dribble past international-class defenders. Lampard’s goal should have stood. If he and some of his colleagues were able to dribble and beat a man, then it may not have mattered.