Because the Football Association says so, Fabio Capello is required to take the English national team to the semi-finals in the World Cup 2010 and/or Euro 2012. Now what I find amazing is why on Earth are we targeting anything less than winning these tournaments? I think that is an incredibly defeatist attitude to have, what is the point of even entering the competition if you don’t think you can win? The first thing that needs to happen in this country is to promote grass roots football more, bigger, better footballing academies and limiting the amount of foreign players allowed to play in the English leagues to increase the pool of players to choose from. At the moment there are certain premiership teams that field entirely foreign teams which means that there is only a small number of top flight players to choose from. The way things are going, within a few years the England manager will have to start picking from second tier players which maybe a good thing.. less ego.. more passion!!! At the moment England have some world class players, but eleven world class players don’t make a world class team, there are far too many ego’s in the national team, until they learn to truly play as a team then success will elude us, we’ll never see the likes of 1966 ever again. At the end of the day, money rules the game these days even at international level, players assume they have a god given right to be in the national team. Players that are excellent for their club sides but fail miserably at international level, maybe there are too many Englishmen in the national team, maybe it’s the language barrier? But I do like what Capello has been doing, shaking up the ‘established’ team and bringing in new faces to assess what he has to choose from when the qualifying games start for the World Cup just after the Euro 2008 tournament, which England will not be part of because of Steve Maclaren’s useless management, again like the players Maclaren is good at club level but simply can’t cut it international level. But the players have to accept part of the blame as frankly they were rubbish, how many let off’s did the English team have in Euro 2008 qualifying? They only needed a draw from the final game at Wembley and somehow managed to lose to Croatia to crash out of the tournament before it even started! Anyway back to the original point, aim to win the damn tournament, never mind realistic expectations, if you are not in it to win, don’t even bother competing. England aren’t going to win anything at all thinking that they aren’t good enough to win the tournament, IDIOTS!
