Why are England so poor a ball retention

England don't know how to retain possession, throughout the tournament England looked the worse team in this tournament they have been outplayed possession wise by all they have faced, i have not seen a team give the ball away as much as England.

There is no top world manager that could do anything with this team which lacks conviction and real belief when plying their trade.

 

Most seem to believe it's simply because we don't have technically gifted players when that's clearly not true. The problem was that we were always sat deep giving us no space to pass it around. Banks of 4 or a bank of 5 and 4 pulls players out of position gives us little option when we retrieve the ball, by tactics or players unwilling to take on the opponents, left us with little option but to hoof. When we actually got the ball into their half we created some good chances and passed fairly well, even if we were a little one dimensional in relying so heavily on crosses.

We don't have to try and dominate possession like Spain to play well but it would've helped if we saw more of the ball by playing with greater confidence in our abilities going forward and looking to play a direct English game like we see at sides like Man Utd.

 

Completely disagree. We evidently don't have the technical ability to pass the ball five yards, and that's obviously why most of the players who went were reserves and subs for the foreign players on whom our domestic league relies for the quality. Downing contributed 0 assists, 0 goals last season and he went to the Euros because we have nobody better, says it all.

No tactic in the world would have made England better at ball retention.

 

Rubbish. English players are not comfortable playing keep ball. They don't need to do it for their club and they can't do it for England. Our players look uncomfortable keeping the ball.

The only English player we have had in recent years who could play that game is Paul Scholes but he didn't have the players around him to help.

 

Of course there were better players than Downing, it's just that Hodgson is a fool.

 

Nonsense, Gerrard is always getting forward and looking to play positive football for Liverpool. Ditto to most of the other players but Hodgson squeezed out the attacking ambition and left them looking scared of the opponents. Ukraine don't have a Scholes, or a Xavi, or a Pirlo yet they still passed circles around us so clearly it's about more than having the best players.

 

A midfield of Scholes Carrick and Wilshere would keep the ball with ease.

 

1. Players like Parker and Gerrard got tired as games went on, and therefore contributed less to attacking in the 2nd Half leaving the Wingers and Strikers alone to fend off the opponents defenders + midfielders.
2. Wingers trying to dribble the other team and finding themselves alone against 3-4 players
3. Missing the link between midfield and attack, people thought it would be Rooney but he was rubbish

 

because when they are young no one teaches them actual skills, it's all about the winning, ergo physicality over skill. Messi wouldn't have ever played professional football if he'd been English, he wouldn't have been considered good enough.

 

Of course he'd have played, his skills might not have been nutured as well however.

 

Im repeating what many have already said - but I played football as a 10 year old. I was playing on a huge pitch and was terrified of the coaches, parents and supporters on the sidelines. and more specifically their reaction if i did anything 'stupid' or 'messed about with it in dangerous areas.' It wasnt common to have a parent bellow at their poor offspring to 'stop f****** about and get rid' whenever they attempted to dare do something so ridiculous as a bit of skill.

Now I would never have made it as a professional. But Im sure people playing in my leagues could have and some did. And they wou have experienced the same pressures as me at a ridiculously young age. Rather than nurturing their ball control, technique and individual skill they would have been 'playing to win' games with other 10 year olds.

As a result, English players seem to be one step behind their foreign counterparts when it comes to keeping hold of the ball. Football should be 'fun' and nothing more until a child reaches 14. Kids should be encouraged to spend hours and hours practising technical ability, dribbling, passing and moving. I once went to a soccer school as a 12 year old and spent most of the time playing matches (!!!)

I fail to see any issue with making football all but non competitive until the age of 14. Running weekly soccer schools where children have the basics drilled into them. There is plenty of time after to train them to be tactically disciplined, they can always get bigger and stronger and they will learn everything else that is required. But the absolute basics are control, technique, passing and moving.

Obviously there are exceptions, and obviously our players that do make it arent bad players by any stretch. But with very few exceptions they all have one fundamental flaw. In spite of all the shooting ability, long pass ability, goalscoring instinct, defensive discipline and winning mentalities that our top players have, you could count on one hand the amount of players they have produced that have the raw technical ability that top players in other nations have.

Arsene Wenger once described technical ability as the foundations of a top footballer. You cannot teach a 25 year old to do what paul scholes does for man utd. What Fabregas did for Arsenal. What Pirlo does for Italy. Somewhere in the system most english players with the potential to do that job have it trained out of them, and the FA needs a root and branch upheavel to change it (now where have we heard that before?)

 

Its not just poor technical ability. But players are very poor tactically and positionally which can make the task of keeping possession even harder. We are very poor out of possession, and especially poor and creating space. If you watch the top teams they never stop moving and are always creating space to receive a pass or make one. England players are generally very stationary making them easy to close down or mark out of the game. Most of our players don't have the "football brain" to make space for themselves which would make their life a lot easier.

 

Again I say, why are we trying to produce poor copies of Spain etc. That could only happen after a massive and complete change that is not possible. In order to be as good as Spain we'd actually have to be Spain! Better to concentrate on what we do better than them. As I said before, the English players are not in PL teams by accident or out of charity, they're only there because they're good enough. If they're good enough for the PL then they're contributing something which foreign players cannot. If they could then there wouldn't be any English PL players at all. So let's stop trying to copy systems we're not up to (god it really annoys me to hear the so-called experts covering their positions today by going on about technical ability), and identify what we do better and *do that instead*. I'm not arguing we should not invest more in coaching, clearly we should, but that is not the short or even medium term answer.

 

Pretty good summary, that.

 

Each premier league team needs to fulfill a quota of home grown players for the FA rules and European registration, so maybe these English players are just there to make up the numbers. As you will see if you look at appearance stats, many of the English players didn't start the majority of games. They are cover for superior foreign players.

 

Last season was the first where there was a quota for Premier League football wasn't it?

I don't think there's any requirement to play a certain amount of English players in any competition at the moment so therefore the ones that are playing regularly for top clubs are not there on anything but merit. This was his point, I believe.

 

Exactly Mr Yid, AFAIK there is no *current* quota, so I ask others to explain not why there are so few English players in the PL, but why are there so many! Sure you could call many of them "understudies" but I think you may be referring to the few clubs with large squads and rotational approaches to games in which case I think (1) those players like Milner, Lescott etc still managed to play rather a lot of games when other "more technical" foreigners were available and (2) for most of the players in the England squad, they were actually first choices for their clubs.

 

What we really need to do is change our schooling and economy. If we had less of that pesky mandatory schooling and a bit more focus on poverty, and maybe a few more beaches, we could also produce the kind of talent that the South Americans, Portuguese and Spanish seem to produce in droves. Of course, as a result there would be considerably more slums, infinitely more murders and you'd probably want to move to somewhere nice (like Australia...whose footie team is a little worse than good old blighty), but at least we'd be good at football.

I think we'd all of us do well to remember that being the best footballing nation on the planet only seems to be the goal of The Sun and their considerable readership. The rest of us should maybe talk to Sweden and ask whether they'd swap their economy, social values and opportunity for those of Brazil, with the added bonus being that some of their new urchins might shun gun crime and become tomorrow's Pele.....

 

Very simple really, coaching.

 

The issue isnt how many english players there are. The issue is the roles they play in their teams.

Im not for a second belittling the jobs that English players play in the top premier league teams. By all accounts Gerrard, Milner, Rooney, Wellbeck, Parker etc either this season or in previous seasons have played integral roles in largely succesful premier league teams. The problem is when you take them out of their organised, tactically prepared and technically efficient teams made largely of foreign players and ask them to play a top national team, their technical flaws are exposed.

Im not suggesting that no footballer is any good unless they can play like Zidane. What Im suggesting is for a team to have sustained success it simply has to have a talisman, a technically brilliant, skillful and astute player who can make things happen. It also needs a number of players who are comfortable on the ball and who can keep it when under pressure.

For all their undoubted talents, keeping hold of the ball is not a common denominator in the abilities of english players. Their instinct is to go forward as quickly as possible. They cannot, as a team, string more than 7 passes together in a row. This is because other teams no how to play them - put them under pressure and they will buckle - theyll play a wayward pass, run into danger or, more often than not, just hoof it as far away from their goal as possible. This is because there is nobody there who can create a bit of space. A sidestep here, a dummy there, a back hell, a feint. It just doesnt happen.

Now there is potential in Wilshere and Cleverly, and Rooney if he ever gets his act together for england. Before that there was Scholes. Before that there was Gascoigne. I have just named 5 (with 2 only potental and one on probation, in about 20 years. Compare this to the abundance of technical talent coming through the ranks at portugal, germany and spain....