So, the biannual investigation into why the English national team is quite so shit as truly begun.
In the wake of a poorly slept and clearly embittered Roy Hodgson waving goodbye after a four year period in which just three tournament games had been won, naturally a number of ex pros have been busy filling up social media offering their two cents into the catastrophe that is the England set up.
Writing in his Daily Mail column, a clearly furious Jamie Carragher aimed his crosshairs at England’s distinct lack of balls and tactical nous, accusing the FA and the Premier League of producing a generation of coddled “babies” – or ‘The Academy Generation’ as he calls them.
He goes on:
Too soft. This is what England’s players have become. The Academy Generation — for that is what they are — are soft physically and soft mentally.
We saw the end result in all its gruesome detail in Nice on Monday when another major tournament ended in calamity and blame.
I call them the Academy Generation because they have come through in an era when footballers have never had more time being coached.
They get ferried to football schools, they work on immaculate pitches, play in pristine training gear every day and everything is done to ensure all they have to do is focus on football. We think we are making them men but actually we are creating babies.
The former no-nonsense centre half then turned his focus to the current England team;
It never is the players’ fault when England crash out of a competition, is it? It’s always the manager not listening or the facilities not being good enough or the climate was too hot or the officials made mistakes. But never the players. Absolutely not.
Well, it’s time to explode that myth. I was in South Africa in 2010. I heard all the complaints about Fabio Capello and his strict methods and all the grumblings about the base where we stayed in Sun City being too isolated.
Do you know the truth? The complaints were bulls**t. We came home early because we were not good enough.
England deserved to go out then, just as we deserved to go out [at Euro 2016].
That weakness that runs through England squads is only getting worse and I was enraged by the way that team disintegrated when the stakes were rising.
I call some of the squad – I don’t believe it applies to the full group – too soft. Why won’t they take responsibility?
They live lives now with personal assistants, player liaison officers, nannies and agents organising every little detail for them. Some wouldn’t even know how to book a holiday or an appointment at the dentist for themselves.
It strips character. You can see that in the interviews they give… there really is no point in watching them, as they are afraid of saying anything.
Does this generation love the game? I’m not sure. That is the Academy Generation. The generation that became too soft.
Quite the damning evaluation.
Whilst it’s easy to sound like an absolute has been by referring to ‘soft players’, it’s hard to pick out any starters that didn’t freeze in a humiliating fashion during the 2-1 defeat to Iceland.
Just for the record, Carragher then went on to pick Jurgen Klinsmann as the man he’d like to see take over from Hodgson in the England set-up, interesting choice no-doubt, we’ll however have to have a think on that one given his mixed reception by US fans.