its got nothing to do with the fact that french, spanish, italian, german, beligian, dutch and well, all the rest of the teams that weren't winning decided to invest heavily in youth coaching and changing the way they ran their football programs completely from top to bottom, no its not that, and england were caught with their head in the sand, thinking they were great and untouchable and there was no need for change whatsoever. so not only did we get a generation of players since the "glory" days who were coached and simply weren't as good, all the players since then have been in worse coaching programs than most across europe, and also we have managers who never went through decent coaching programs physically themselves, and so can't bring that level of coaching to their clubs now.
Even "most" of the good footballing people in our country realise the problem is in coaching, i simply highlighted the difference in coaching, fabregas was brought through a program teaching him THE GAME and how to be most effective and was taught the simple/beautiful game, where our youngsters are convinced that being able to do a stepover is the key to being the best in our league.
we are full of people who can do tricks, and very few who read the game well. if you look at englands top players, gerrard, lampard, owen, shearer, lineker they were good at reading the game, they aren't full of tricks. go to a youth team and see how they are being coached, they are running around like a pack of disorganised pratt's seeing who can do the better stepover.
our country has convinced itself we aren't as good at the technical play as other countries. but personally, i fail to see germany, italy, spain, portugal, brazil really play a "technical" side. yes portugal, brazil have their overly good technical players, but most of the portugal side isn't doing stepovers, and ronaldo's strength isn't the stepovers, its the simple inteligent runs into the box.
we as a country are going to fail, until we realise its the simple game, not the technical stuff to focus on. you can hit the ball 60 yards and hit the blade of grass you were aiming for, but if you can't read the game no ones going to be there when you do.
EDIT:_ wrote half the post based on reading the first half of the last post, which apparently wasn't a good idea
i agree somewhat with most of what he said, its all about the coaching in general, but not completely that. some players are simply good enough that they learn the game very well anyway. but i still believe its got nothing to do with players being technically better. i think eduardo's run, turning the right way and pretty much the perfect pass was nothing but simple idea with perfect execution. lescott made a howler, campbell did what he was supposed to do, he moved across to cover the run of eduardo, at which point lescott should have run full speed to plug the whole, which he completely failed to do. there wasn't an offside trap play, when all the defenders are backpeddling you can't play the offside trap. whoever was making the run being made of the other striker should have got along side and between him and the ball, but failed. lescott would have intercepted the pass, if he had plugged the gap and not got drawn into the ball when eduardo was marked by 3 players and going nowhere. bridge for the only point in the game remains blameless, had eduardo continued his run without cutting inside, bridge was where he needed to be, and had lescott + whoever was running with bobo or whatever his name is covered the run it was simple. but the thing here is the move was incredibly simple from croatia, anyone can do that, the timing of the run, the pass, the not panicking and the simple finish, thats something england coaching by and large can't produce, in quantity that other countries can.
