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I used to think people were crazy to complain that foreigners in the Premier League were killing the England national team. But now I think they’re right - only it’s not the foreign players, it’s the foreign owners that are to blame. The massive influx in money (highlighted by the recent madness at Manchester City) has created a culture in the Premier League where winning and staying in all competitions is important not just for the fans and players, but also to the long-term financial health of the club. Meaning that trivial things like World Cup qualifiers and even cup games are given second-class status to Premier League weekend games and European competition.

Take the example of Steven Gerrard’s latest injury. It seems that Gerrard has been playing on a groin injury for a while, even after further aggravating it in a midweek Champion’s League qualifier that Liverpool had to win. So what does Manager Rafa Benitez do? Asks him to gut it out for the weekend Premier League game and then schedule surgery for the international break - which, as you can imagine, did not initially sit well with England Manager Fabio Capello.

Rafa Benitez insisted he had made his peace with England coach Fabio Capello yesterday and dismissed claims of a breakdown in communication over Steven Gerrard’s latest injury absence.

Gerrard will have the second of two minor groin operations today and will miss Capello’s first two competitive games in charge, as England begin their World Cup campaign against Andorra next Saturday and Croatia four days later.

Capello was reportedly unhappy at being kept in the dark over Liverpool’s decision to arrange surgery for their skipper in the immediate aftermath of Wednesday night’s Champions League qualifying round win over Standard Liege.

Now it seems that captain John Terry, Frank Lampard, Owen Hargreaves, Wes Brown, and Ashley Cole will also miss one or both international games - which leaves me wondering how England is expected to get a result against Croatia - the team that will most likely be their toughest competition in the group - in a competition where, unlike Euro 2008 qualifying, winning the group is paramount to qualification. I know it happens on-and-off already, but is this going to get to the point where clubs will start to come up with all kinds of excuses to keep their best players out of all international games?

I suppose the good thing is that some non-regulars like Fulham’s Jimmy Bullard will get a chance to impress Capello. But without some kind of continuity in Capello’s system, how can the team be expected to play as a unit? Some would say Capello should drop the overpaid regulars and give the young England stars more consideration. But Capello seems to have a fondness for a more grizzled England team (see:David Beckham) with Michael Owen the only notable exception.

I say instead of picking an England All-Star team, just send Aston Villa. They seem to be the only Premier League team stockpiling young England talent (Ashley Young, Gabby Agbonlahor, Gareth Barry, Steve Sidwell, Luke Young, Curtis Davies, etc.) and there’ll be no worries about not playing together. I suppose they need to find someone to replace Carew, Laursen, Friedel and a few others, but it would certainly have saved them from paying both Shteve McClaren and Fabio Capello all that money when they could get the guy (Martin O’Neill) they probably should have hired after Sven left. Of course we’ll look past the fact that Villa’s owners are American and their manager is Irish!

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The new England manager is introduced to the press - and he doesn’t speak English. Surely a sore spot for the proud English football supporters.

And the newspapers were right on target with the derision. The Sun:

So what did we learn yesterday? Precious little to add to what we already knew.

The mountain of information made available to us had included his love of philosophy, classical music and art.

He is even rumoured to have a £5million Chagall hanging on his wall. Which made a change from Sven, whose own taste was more along the lines of Shag-all.

He also likes hiking in Tibet and visiting archaeological sites.

Well, he’s come to a classic one here.

England, the country whose football is in a similar state of disrepair to the Foro Romano, the ancient Roman ruins he knows so well from his time in the Italian capital.

The Daily Mail seemed a little more perturbed:

But when the formalities were completed, it was clear it was not Capello being welcomed into this New England, it was us.

We are now outsiders. We wait for some translated banality to be passed on like grateful tourists in our own national game. All thanks to a governing body that has so completely lost sight of its duty that the country’s team has merely a passing acquaintance with England.

In fact, the only evidence of a meaningful English presence in this entire charade is on the banknotes bearing The Queen’s face currently being whisked away to an Italian bank by Capello and his legion of coaching staff.

But The Telegraph gave him the respect his experience and presence commanded:

Fabio Capello swept into an auditorium at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London yesterday like a distinguished emeritus professor from Italy intent on educating a bunch of unruly English undergraduates. His audience was swiftly captivated, spell-bound by the presence of a managerial heavyweight now in the Football Association’s employ.

The FA have been involved in some momentous calamities in recent years -building the white elephant that is Wembley, dithering over the much-needed National Football Centre, and appointing Steve McClaren - but yesterday they displayed a fitness to govern by asking Capello to bring some method to the madness of English football.

From McClaren to Capello, from the Wally with the Brolly to the Man with the Plan, in 26 days: even by England’s surreal, switchback standards, this has been a staggering turnaround. The game’s maturing process from penalty-missing, tournament-missing adolescence to trophy-chasing adulthood has only just begun.

It’s going to be an interesting and fun four years. Expect Becks to get his 100th and play some part on the bench in a leadership and experience role. At least for 2008.

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The “Jose Mourinho to England” dream is dead. I’m guessing they didn’t like what he was selling (or more likely what he wanted to control). But apparently he won’t be without work for long:

The ex-Chelsea boss has been out of work since leaving Stamford Bridge by mutual consent in September.

Mourinho had been the favourite to replace the sacked Steve McClaren as manager of the English national team, however the Portuguese tactician is believed to have turned down the Football Association’s job offer.

According to the Gazzetta dello Sport and a number of English tabloids, the reason for this rejection is AC Milan.

The Daily Express apparently have a hilarious take on the fact that Jose used England to generate interest from other clubs.

And it now looks like Fabio Capello is the next in line. He’s considered too old for club jobs and he’s had success, winning titles at every club he’s been with. And he was the one who motivated Beckham’s return to form with Real Madrid. TheDaily Express has a take on that too - warning that Fabio Cabbage will have eventually trouble with the media such as the picture on the left.

UPDATE: It’s Official - FABIO’S THE MAN

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I’m seeing more and more parallels between Dolphins’ head coach Cam Cameron and former England national team manager Steve McClaren. Becks came out after getting knocked out of the Euros and said that he didn’t fear the England gaffer:

The former England captain, 32, put the boot in on Michael Parkinson’s final chat show — less than 24 hours after England were knocked out.

Becks said: “I’ve been scared of every manager I’ve had. That included my dad when I was seven or eight.

“Every one of my managers scared me.” Parky, 72, asked: “And Steve McClaren?”

David broke into a grin and said: “I’m a lot more grown up now and a lot braver.”

Similarly Cam Cameron has made no believers about his ability to be a head coach. His in-game tactics, his choice of personnel, and everything in between has failed to produce even one win this season - where every other NFL team has already won 2 games in the era of “Any Given Sunday” parity. Something tells me that his players have had enough too. I know I have: (Copy of original article here)

But the blame for this game does not rest solely on the players. This loss, more than any other this season, is the fault of the Miami coaching staff.

If the Patriots had blown out the Dolphins, one could argue the disparity of points was due to a disparity of talent. But against the previously 2-9 Jets, a team that was an underdog coming into the game, the Dolphins coaching staff was supposed to make a difference.

Cameron and his coaches failed in that regard.

”This was an effort on everybody’s part, it’s not just players,” defensive end Vonnie Holliday said. “It’s players and coaches. I think everyone can look in the mirror, top to bottom, and say they are contributing to being 0-12.”

That sort of contribution will get a coach fired, and though December is not yet the time to fully judge Cameron, the coach’s job security is now a fair topic of conversation in the locker room.

And in that conversation, no one is coming to Cameron’s defense.

I would be more confident if I saw progress in a winless season. Where initially we had blowouts that slowly turned into close games. But it seems to be going the other way. The team is playing with no confidence that they are being put in a position to win. Just like England. And we know how that ended.

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Lots of interesting articles questioning the qualifications of Steve McClaren and the skill level of English footballers in a culture that perhaps doesn’t value the right qualities. Simon Barnes of the Times writes about McClaren’s desire to please the press rather than find his own way.:

It is not that the job is impossible. Eriksson took England to three successive quarter-finals and through three successful qualification campaigns. Of course the pressure is intense, that’s why the job needs a man of remarkable strength, one who is certain of what he wants, equally contemptuous of critics and flatterers, with the nerves of a burglar and a deep understanding of international football.

Such men exist. They are rare, which is why they command high salaries. The pressure is absurd, the criticism hysterical in many countries: we need not plume ourselves on being especially awful, save in our fascination with the sexual lives of footballing men. But what the job demands above all else is a self-confidence devoid of vanity. McClaren had the exact opposite.

This has been a woeful 17 months for English football. It looked like a disaster from day one and so it turned out. I don’t think any of us is in the least bit surprised about that. McClaren never had it: you could see it in the cut of his jib; above all, you could see it in his smile.

Michael Owen, who was injured and watched the game on TV, thinks that England succumbed to the pressure of the moment:

‘It came down to the pressure of making a mistake when it really mattered. If we’d won the games we should have, we wouldn’t have ended up putting that kind of pressure on ourselves. It was our own fault.

‘The best sportsman can deal with it, someone like Tiger Woods thrives on it.

‘When you play at this high level, 99% of your performance level takes place in your head and that puts a big onus in coping mentally.

‘When fear takes over, you start to do things wrong and take the easy option which in our case is lumping the ball forward to the front men.

‘I’m not absolving myself from blame just because I was not playing. What must be addressed as much as anything is our psychological preparations.’

Martin Samuel thinks that there’s a culture of fear in English Football:

Brooking talks up his skills programme, but there is little point in teaching a ten-year-old the Cruyff turn if he is expected to put it into practice on a full-sized pitch with his coach screaming at him to clear his lines. The whole process requires reform, not one executive aspect of it.

It is almost as if English footballers are out of practice in thinking about the game. Gareth Barry was required to anchor England’s midfield against Croatia, yet the statistics show that his touches of the ball were generally in more advanced positions than Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard, thus negating the plan to have them breaking forward to latch on to Peter Crouch’s knock-downs. Other countries, the Netherlands in particular, give the sport an intellectual centre. Yet in both games, Croatia’s midfield looked brighter than ours. Better educated. Better prepared. They knew what they wanted to achieve and had paid attention in class.

Whoever follows McClaren will need to be a strong personality. Some of the malaise within the English game, specifically at grass roots, is not his to change, so all that can be done is to work on removing the fear from the elite players. It requires a psychologist — José Mourinho or Martin O’Neill, thinking men who may approach the problem from a fresh angle, single-minded and unafraid.

And finally, Bobby McMahon confronts the idea that passion is the number one quality to look for in a player:

Passion - England (and often Scotland’s) answer to any football problem. Could someone please explain to me why so many British fans seem to believe that passion is some sort of differentiator between British sides and foreign teams?

How does that square with the foreign (particularly Latin) stereotype of being hot tempered and dare I say overly “passionate”? Isn’t the constant use of the word “passion” just another way of saying technically inferior and the only way that it can be covered up is running around more and trying harder? It may work in the short term but it has a limited shelf life.

Doesn’t it strike everyone as a bit odd that while British fans worship at the altar of passion that it is other countries - who apparently are not so passionate - produce teams that win the WC and European championships?

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• FOX Sports on MSN - England - Sampling of British press reaction http://tinyurl.com/2edwqe My favorite was “The Wally With The Brolly” #
• http://english2american.com/ - use this link to translate #

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