England for the cup!

[alexmick]

This is not an excuse, but a reason why we seem to never perform well on the big stage anymore: Just over 30% of players in the PL are of English descent. The rest are from overseas. Until they bring back the old ruling of 'no more than 3 foreign players allowed to play for a club per match', then I cannot see an improvement in the situation.

We used to have a quota system, and won nothing. Maybe the answer is a plan for the future... We can do that by learning from the past... Not reverting back to it[/quote]

We won nothing, true. But we did produce some star players (Keegan, Gascoigne, Bell, Charlton, Banks, etc..etc..) and did perform better than in recent competitions. 1990 was a good example, I think.

[ChalkDust]

For some reason, the England for the cup thread won't let me reply to your point about player quotas Mick (why does it do that?), so I have started a new one!

You made the point... "We won nothing, true. But we did produce some star players (Keegan, Gascoigne, Bell, Charlton, Banks, etc..etc..) and did perform better than in recent competitions. 1990 was a good example, I think."

I just wanted to point out an alternative view to yours...

Yes, we performed well in 1990, as we did in 1996 and I guess you could include 1986 in that too. However, I would suggest that after winning the World Cup in 1966, we had more disappointing tournament performances than we did 'successful' ones. 1974, 1978, 1982, 1994 (all prior to the quota system being removed) were good examples, I think.

In fact, one could argue that we have our most consistent run of tournament performances (3 consecutive quarter finals between 2002 and 2006) after the quota system had been abolished.

Also, you state Keegan a

[KennyLuntsFanClub]

For 43 minutes of their (ultimately poor) World Cup, I thought Spain were terrific and had Silva made it 2-0 against the Dutch, that would have been that and Holland would have imploded, as they always do. He didn't and the wheels came off very badly.

They are still the World Champions (2 more weeks) and have a "second string" of better players than England in every position on the field. With that scenario and the 23 we took being almost everyone's choice, there is no future for the national team here.

We'll get to the Euros in 2016- 32 from 54 makes it almost impossible not to- and the same thing will happen all over again. Young generation or crap generation?