England need more home-grown talent

I spent a lot of the summer watching Euro 2008 as I´m sure a lot of you did too. What a great tournament it was. It´s true that it´s not the same without England there but to be honest I think they did us a favour by not qualifying. The team would only have disappointed and everyone would have been too down to watch the rest of the matches.

The way the team played in qualifying I really don´t think England would have made much of an impact on the teams in Austria and Switzerland. It´s true to say that Croatia and Russia proved themselves to be much better teams than we thought at the finals but even so we had a pretty straightforward group and should have at least been able to finish second.

In the end I think things worked out pretty well. A new manager came in six months earlier than he would have done and that extra time with the players can only be a good thing. Hopefully he can look at the example of Spain for the kind of football we should be playing. They barely had a player over 6ft and kept the ball on the ground. Every one of their players was technically gifted and they fully deserved to win the tournament.

On the whole though I can´t see English football getting much better without the home-grown players rule. I think it would help the national side massively and not just in England but in other countries too. When Inter Milan played Liverpool in the Champions League I don´t think there was an Italian in the team and even at youth level teams like Chelsea have very few English lads in the set-up. Having a set number of home-grown players in each team would give young players a much better opportunity to develop and England and other nations would only benefit from that.

I´ll be back soon with more news on how Yeovil´s pre-season is going...