Getting a lesson on how to play football

never mind - all the sadsackwankers will all be cheering when they win the best league in the world again (titter)

Are United in the Intertoto now?

oh will they ever bring it back?

Bristol Rovers once won that. Beat Sheff Utd 7-6 in 1972.

I think all the whole country, including our country's finest managers and coaches were given a football lesson last night. We need to start afresh, send young coaches over to Spain to learn, how to play the Spanish way, forget about our 'established' coaches and methods keep them isolated, then start again with the youngsters when they join academy's/centres of excellences. Keep them away from the current crop of pro's who will 'corrupt' their new style. Forget about the next 10 years of bumbling through national tournaments and being embarrassed by playing neanderthal football. As long as we keep feeding youngsters into the system as we do now to replace the retirees then our game/style/technical ability will never catch up as they will be influenced by what they see and who they play with.
Bilbao are 7th in their league, apparently there are 6 better teams than them. This 7th team could have scored 6 or 7 against arguably our best club team.
Just a thought!!!

Personally I think it's great how humiliated the Premier League has been in Europe this year.

Just need Chelsea to get one of the Spaniards in the draw this morning now.

The reason Spain does so well is from bottom to top in their national acadmey they play the same way dictated by the top coaches. They allows kids up to the age of about 15 to play in all positions and not just lump the tallest kid upfront or in goal, I dont think they even allocated poisitons to kids till after this point. The dutch showed this to the world ages ago with "total football" and the Spainish have taken it to the next step. They learn about touch, retaining the ball and beating a man by knocking him off bablance not kick and run or hoof ball.

Unfortunatly this takes time, remember Spain we shite before 2000 and their league (like the PL now) was littered with imports, now they have their house in order through Real an Barca academies playing the same way the only other nationality players in the league are the cream of the crop.

The whole scouting/coaching/academy/centre of excellence systems in this country are shocking.

We have an under 14 team. They are in the cup final and are top of their division.

Our biggest fear is losing some of them to academies. Its happened before and it will again. And they always come back a shadow of the player they were. Why is this? What the fookety fook do they do to them at these places?

We are trying to talk to Newcastle at the moment about maybe doing things a bit different. Four of our team are being watched by them.

We hope to get them involved with us, and give coaching, but allow us to keep them playing. One of the big issues with the academy system here is that the kids get about an hours coaching two three times a week.

Get yourself down to Dyke House on a wednesday about 6pm to see how shit the Pools coaching is. And how many little kids they have with deluded parents.

Something else bugging me at present:

We have regular visits to our games from Newcastle United, the odd visit from Middlesbrough, and a couple from Sunderland.

We have the best players at under 14 in the town playing for us.

Pools have never watched us play.

you've mentioned this before and the belief that something is right when it clearly ain't, is startling. The problem comes from the indoctrinated coaches and people running the game here, your Mick Wadsworths, Howard Wilkinsons, Trevor Brookings etc aren't going to change so they must be changed for people with new philosophies.
For a long time I've thought the FA's coaching badges are not worth a wank - they can't be, because the standard of the home international football teams is rubbish, and laughable. It's hilarious that people genuinely think of people like Gerrard as being world class - I've never laughed so much since Fawlty Towers!!!!