Experts believe that it is between the ages of five and eleven that children learn skills and habits, good or bad, that remain with them throughout their lives; this applies equally to education, personality and sports. It is during this vital period that footballers can be made or destroyed. A few years of being trained by an aggressive and unskilled manager to throw long balls into the channels and 'get rid of him' at a formative age can result in a player returning to that training early every time the pressure rises (like we've seen teams from England do it many times over the years) or even lose their love for the game entirely.
In response to the latest confirmation of the national team's failures, the FA recently launched a skills initiative to target youth in this age group. The goals of this initiative are to raise general standards of play, discover talented players at an early age, and most importantly, ensure that they receive the proper training. The FA scheme, a creation of Sir Trevor Brooking, could actually benefit not only football, but English sport in general, as one of its main goals is to improve children's agility, balance and coordination, the base of many
ข่าวบอลอังกฤษ. The FA will deploy coaches across the country to carry out this task, and each region will have an additional coach whose task will only be to educate other coaches and raise the general training standard that young footballers receive. Hopefully, better training will result in future generations of technically savvy English footballers being able to play the fast-paced passing game as evidenced by age groups at Arsenal academies in North London.
For too long, regional FAs have operated different policies from each other, resulting in confusion and inconsistency in youth training. For the first time there will be a coordinated and centralized strategy applied throughout the country. Brooking explains: 'We have to integrate to raise the bar to the grassroots level. If we do, we will do it at the top level. That is why multiple skills are the starting point for all young people. We want to analyze agility, balance and coordination, then try to identify those who can become specific to football. From those in the age range of five to 11 years we can get the best, who should enter an elite program. '' A worthy goal, and one well received by other soccer figures, such as Newcastle boss Sam Allardyce, who laments: 'We are not great athletes from an early age. You can't expect football to develop players from the age of six without proper quality identification programs and ways to educate promising young people through the early ages to develop their talent. '' Then he adds ominously, "Until we have the basics, our chances of raising a World Cup winning team are as remote as our chances of raising an English Wimbledon champion." It goes without saying that Andy Murray is, of course, Scottish.
English football is low on money, the FA is one of the richest organizations in world football, and English clubs make more money than any other nation, but the problem is how the money is spent. Brooking wants more money to be invested in training children ages five to eleven, and introducing specialized grades and assessments for youth coaches. He also wants the philosophy of English coaching to change, to be more similar to the approach seen in Latin America, Europe and Africa. If he can do that, then maybe, just maybe England could have a chance.
