Football for the brave

[Footballcoach]

With our olympics success splashed across the back pages and another poor performance of the england football squad last night

Having just read John Cartwright's "Football for the Brave" its made me wonder whether all the hype associated with foreign coaches in our club football is really the key to success or whether we need to look closer to home and make full use of some of the resources we already have?

anyone got any thoughts?

[viva italia]

I have preferred to view this forum anonymusly for a while up till reading the post by football coach. I trust its not a racist comment as that has no place in football these days. Assuming not, I wonder where football coach gets his facts from. Didn't we have 3 teams in the champions league semi finals last season. Ok so England were poor but under Mr Capello we are improving our passing.
I wonder what John Cartwright has to offer. I notice you don't give any hints as to what may actually be wrong with current coaching. Perhaps you would like to go into details into what words of wisdom are written in the book.
ps and yes I have been into my local bookshop to see if they had a copy.

[Val]

Well, thanks for registering viva italia, and for posting your thoughts.

I don't think footballcoach's thoughts are racist per se, or at least I know several reasonable people who have held similar thoughts. At least here in America it is easy to see how this discussion gains traction.

Since our countries have distinct nationalities and characters, sometimes it helps to develop that distinctiveness in our soccer games. In America, we don't have a distinct personality (having borrowed everything from everywhere) and it gives our national team a split personality. We for years have copied the traditional English game: long passes, good off the ball movement, spacing and direct play. Which are all elements of well played soccer, but we lack the nuance to play any other way, and we, like everyone else on the planet, have been looking to the Brazilian good ball control model in recent years. I don't know if we are getting better. I tend to think we'd do better if we succeeded at developing the strengths of the English model, rather than frenetically changing on the fly. Of course, before all things Brazilian came into vogue, it was the supposed Dutch model that everyone was trying to emulate. I just think that maybe countries would do better forging their own style of play and dictating that on lesser teams, rather than trying to adopt whatever fad comes into being. I've only seen two of England's games under Capello, and it seems to me that he's still playing an English game, he's just better at it than McLaren was.