Football

Cardinal Sin.

Yeah the marijuana leaves are a bit ott

Someone hold me

FAO Markyboy, fancy a little day trip to Leicester for the opening game?

Yes, if I don't have the kids and you behave yourself.

We've got an absolute mare start to the season...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-27939845

"The Tartan Army Fan partying with the Uruguayans is Mark McConville who brought lots of fitba strips for weans in the Amazon region,"

Didn't realise Begbie had taken up charity work.

Gold. Sponsorships from buckfast and irn bru await.

Chris Waddle, channeling his inner Clintsmoker, shooting from the lip..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02191f7

He's right. But the problem runs deeper, because we don't coach kids properly in this country, instead we get them playing competitive games as soon as we can, which doesn't teach you the basics.

so when the clowns return next week,
I'm expecting effigies to be on display at Heathrow

If they are as out of position as the team for the second goal the effigies will be in Stanstead.

top tier of football need to look long and hard at themselves, as they should do with every passing tournament where we fail to get into the squeaky bum stages..

can't claim its the best league in the world, if the players your sides produce aren't up to snuff in international competition.

Premier League has the most money but is unwilling to spend it on producing a better national team. Greg Dyke has his work cut out, if we're to win the world cup in 2022...

^^^ When I was 11-12 I played goalie in a Saturday morning league on a full size pitch with full sized goals which meant I learned really quickly how to pick the ball out the net from being lobbed all the fucking time

Playing competitive games on a full sized pitch has not stopped the Dutch producing a disproportionate amount of quality footballers, the problems in England and the FA run far deeper than that. First and foremost it's about facilities. Any given shithole in the Netherlands will have at least 2 amateur clubs that have 4 professionally maintained pitches + 2 training pitches and these days a artificial pitch thrown in for good measure. They must have FA qualified coaches etc. it's all highly organised and competitive.
The main emphasis is on technique until the age of 14, when they've already played on a full sized pitch for 4 years and each year the clubs will cull lesser talented players from the top group.

article in the #youknowwhere about the rise of Belgium's young talented players

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/jun/06/belgium-blueprint-gave-birth-golden-generation-world-cup-

if you haven't read it you should, but the following paragraphs are the meat and potatoes of it..

For the federation, the watershed moment came in 1998 when Belgium were eliminated at the group stage at the World Cup finals in France. Bob Browaeys, who has coached Belgium youth teams at every level and played a major part in putting together Sablon’s blueprint, says there was “no unified vision on youth” at that point. He remembers 30 federation coaches, drawn from the Dutch- and French-speaking parts of the country, meeting to discuss a radical change in approach.

“You have to know that at the end of the 90s in Belgium, they all played with individual marking, sometimes with a sweeper, it was 4-4-2, it was even 3-5-2, we got a lot of results with our A team, because we played very organised. But it was defensive, a culture of counter-attack,” Browaeys says.

Tapping into philosophies and training methods in the national setups in Netherlands and France, their neighbours in the north and south, as well as at clubs such as Ajax and Barcelona, Browaeys and his colleagues proposed that every Belgium youth team would play 4-3-3 and that work should begin on producing a totally different type of player.

“It was a massive shift but we believed that 4-3-3, at that moment, was the strongest learning environment for our players,” Browaeys says. “We felt that we had to develop dribbling skills, we said at the heart of our vision was 1v1, the duel. We said when a boy or girl wants to start playing football, you must offer first the dribble, let them play freely.”

By the time Sablon took over as acting technical director in 2001, there was a playing philosophy but little in the way of structure. Sablon provided that and more. His arrival was also well-timed. Belgium had just co-hosted Euro 2000 with the Netherlands and, although they played poorly and failed to get out of their group, they made a tidy profit off the field.

Sablon made sure a chunk of that money was invested in youth development. A new national football centre was built in Tubize, on the outskirts of Brussels. The number of people enrolling on the entry-level coaching course increased tenfold after the federation made it free. Double PASS, a subsidiary of the University of Brussels, were appointed to audit all the youth systems at club level and make recommendations (the Premier League started using the same company nine years later).

Around the same time Sablon commissioned the University of Louvain to carry out an extensive study on youth football in Belgium, which involved filming 1,500 matches across different age groups. He had worked closely with the clubs for some time, holding regular meetings with academy directors to exchange ideas and encourage them to contribute towards the changing face of Belgian football, but not everyone was convinced.

The university’s results, Sablon says, were a turning point. “That’s why we started with scientific analysis. If we showed the clubs the figures of young boys and girls playing at under-eight and under-nine, and they touched the ball twice in half an hour, no one can say that it’s good. We had the proof. We had the figures. And this was people who were known in football. The guy who made the analysis, Werner Helsen, was a player and a coach in the second division, so he’s a professor in university but also a real football man.”

Yes, you can add Germany, Belgium, France and plenty if other countries to that list. It's laughable really how football is run in England.

The FA stands for Fucking Amateurs I believe, which would explain it.

Greg Dyke was laughing and shaking his head when the World Cup draw was made.
He should have been sacked on the spot for that. How are the team supposed to go there with confidence when thats how the wankers at the top behave?

Greg Dyke was laughing and shaking his head when the World Cup draw was made.
He should have been sacked on the spot for that. How are the team supposed to go there with confidence when thats how the wankers at the top behave?

He wasn't wrong though was he? The red bastard.

Anybody supports the premiership is to blame for the the malaise of the English national side, it is obvious?

Not really? Could you use it in a sentence?

Come on then Italy. Think of us instead of yourselves.

Can I just say that it has been a privilege to see Jordan fucking Henderson light up the World Cup this year.

FA Chairman Greg Dyke says that Roy Hodgson will remain England manager until 2016.

Thanks for nothing...

It'll be a draw and we'll be on the plane home.

Chris Waddle, channeling his inner Clintsmoker, shooting from the lip..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02191f7

Kind of agree with most of this.