England should put all of their eggs in the Under-21 basket

England should put all of their eggs in the Under-21 basket

Right now the Premier League is blessed with an unusually talented mini-generation of English players. It is high time the nation started to prioritise youth for a little more than 90 minutes a decade


Harry Kane is part of an unusual mini-generation of talented English players. Photograph: Ben Sawyer/Ips/Rex

Generally, we don’t tend to like it in this country when people talk too much about young talented footballers. In part this is due to a very English superstition that simply by talking about the obvious high-end talent of, say, Jordon Ibe – the Rotherhithe Ronaldo, the Bermondsey Bale, the Borough High Street Bjornebye – you’re going to jinx the whole thing, confusing these helpless foundlings, eroding their brittle, flukish talent by describing it in words. Never mind English football’s clogged arteries and parasitic interests, the basic viciousness of the industry. The real problem when it comes to the failure to launch from talented youth to high-class athlete is bashed-out internet articles with headlines such as “six hot young things to look out for at Euro 2020”.

There are two things worth saying about this. Firstly, over-praising young players is clearly a bad idea. However, a system that rewards a teenage reserve with a yearly salary 15 times what the prime minister earns might have already done all the damage a frothy line in a match report is likely to inflict. And secondly, if we can accept talent in sport is a product of robust systems and strong minds – rather than a hilariously fragile accident, something left out by the fairies – it is probably more useful actually to talk about these things now and then.

With this in mind I’m going to point out what is already obviously the case. Right now the Premier League is blessed with an unusually talented mini-generation of English players. With the European Under-21 Championship three months away, Gareth Southgate could, at a quick glance, pick a 4-3-3 made up of Jack Butland, Luke Shaw, John Stones, Eric Dier, Calum Chambers, Ross Barkley, James Ward-Prowse, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Raheem Sterling, Harry Kane and Ibe. Blimey. It’s a team. Not just that, a good team. Take that, meticulously refined Deutsch Fussball-Bund development structure!

So what do we do with it now? Already there have been suggestions this artisan crop should be set aside, protected from over-exertion at a tournament they would surely have a chance of actually winning, never mind most of these players will be spending their summer on some gruellingly lucrative club tour in any case. Plus, there is already a vague sense this is all somehow beneath them already – that these fragile upstart talents will be flummoxed, retarded, fatally confused by the experience of playing in challenging tournament conditions against the best in Europe.

Whereas in fact the evidence suggests exactly the opposite. Barring injury every single one of them should go to the Euros. The benefits are obvious, not only for the players and the national team and the mental wellbeing of all who wish them well. But for the brand too, the product, the general sense of something slightly empty behind the noise that has hovered around our wastrel league for the past two decades.

At which point wind chimes tinkle, the screen dissolves and we tumble back through the time to November 2000 and probably the last time English football felt itself blessed with a crop of mixed and varied talents. In the interregnum between Kevin Keegan and the slow congealment of the Age of Sven England played Italy in Turin, with Peter Taylor in charge of a squad containing six players aged 22 and under.

Young England played well but lost. And looking back now the diverging paths taken by England and Italy’s boys of 2000 is salutary. Six years on Italy won the World Cup, with six players from that Azzurri team in Turin on the pitch in the final, a supremely well-bonded team that romped around the host country, Germany, like handsome, cosseted schoolboys.

England, meanwhile, ended up taking 10 players from Turin 2000 to Germany. And yet rather than decorating the World Cup, they stunk the place out, performing on the big stage like a trunk full of startled kittens abandoned on a motorway verge, a mess of curdled talent and gimlet-eyed paranoia, and a team that looked genuinely shocked – shocked! – to find themselves taking part in some kind of football tournament.

So what happened in between? England made a gesture in a friendly. Italy followed a process. In 2004 a full-strength Italy team went to the 2004 European Under-21 Championship in Serbia and Montenegro and won it. Two years later six of those Under-21s joined the seniors to form that World Cup-winning unit. Meanwhile England, champions of unfettered youth for – let’s see – a good 90 minutes, didn’t even qualify in 2004. A chop-and-change team finished below Turkey in their group, the key moment a 4-2 defeat by a Portugal Under-21 team which would later provide three penalty takers in the shootout that eliminated England’s old lags and frazzled club-football celebrities from Germany 2006.

Obviously this is not to suggest England are going to win the World Cup if they continue to take Under-21 football seriously. But they may at least end up facing the right way. The FA would be doing the orderly, sensible thing for the national team. However, it also feels right for the Premier League, English football’s own grandly desiccated stage set, a chance to show that it can produce talent, that there is something distinct and fecund behind all the branded noise, grudging fruits of all those bodged and contrary millions.

There is an exciting team in there right now. Sterling is as good as anything around in that upright, high pressure inside forward role. Kane, who has already benefitted from Under-19 and Under-21 age-group careers, still seems to be playing a more urgent, exciting, deliciously sensual game of football than anybody else on the pitch and perhaps for once it might just be best to make a little noise about this, to trust in the system, and to see how good our own captive princelings can become.

Guardian