St. George's Park

[creative_username_1]

I'm all for the new training facilities but you can't ignore randomness in being one of the reasons something happened

[Green]

Yes randomness will always play a part but surely you want to put the weight of probability of producing a good side as much in your favour as possible.

[Hoop Blah]

I think that might've been more true 20 years ago buy these days, especially with the number of charter standard clubs around, I think that's just not really applicable any more.

Never watched or heard the parents standing behind the white line - or supposed to be behind it, anyway?

They're nolonger running teams in the same way though. The point is that most kids teams, at least locally, have a 'qualified' coach/manager who is the main point of influence for the teams.

Unless you want to orphane all promising young players I don't think you can ever get away from parental influence, good or bad, having some bearing on a young players development. It is much less of an issue with organised teams than it was 20 years ago though.

[Stuboo]

Euro 2000:England & Germany both awful - technically deficient, tactically naive, no creativity, old players.

As a result, Germany identified an issue they had with a lack of players with creative ability in their youth development structure, and specifically developed a programme to address this.

10 years later they have one of the most vibrant attacking teams in Europe, producing exciting young players such as Ozil, Gotze and Muller

We can never been Spain, but there's not reason we couldn't follow a similar path to our Saxon cousins.

St George's Park is definitely a very good thing. Judge it on our performances from Qatar 22 onwards to see how well it's working.

I agree. And we also seem to be addressing the areas we need to - the lack of quality coaching and the development of more technically gifted young players.

It all sounds good, but we will have to wait and see.