Too thick to win

[Miguel Sanchez]

One supplement I'll make to the initial articles and the talk about Harry Kane, in that game against Iceland he was regularly taking corners. Despite the fact he was the team's striker, despite the fact he doesn't take them for his club, despite the fact that not one of them led to any sort of meaningful chance. Yet he kept on taking them. Presumably he had been told to do so by Hodgson. Presumably he'd been taking them in training. Yet in all of that, he's not said he thinks he'd be better in the box, or that players who regularly take corners should be on them. Nobody else in the team did. Is that emblematic of this thread's premise?

If that isn't I personally think England's failures - as an eventual result of many other symptoms - are because while the players might want to be stars and be heralded as the next saviour of the entire country, none of them are for their clubs. How many players in the English team at Euro 2016 were the best player for their club? And how many of them play second-fiddle to one of those foreign players who control games, who have that intelligence and tactical flexibility?

I also don't have any doubt that all of this is true in Scotland, perhaps more damagingly so because while you can make a good living and be set after being at worst a Championship squad player in order to achieve that here everything has to be centred around Celtic and Rangers. A much smaller opportunity for success as a footballer leads to more people being put out of a career centred around that one thing. I  guess nobody wins either way in this situation.

Ed - I forgot to mention, when you go in the opposite direction you get melts like Joey Barton. Make of that what you will.

[Blue92]

Wayne Rooney for example, doesn't look thick to me, he seems to be very astute imo.

[Barry Ferguson's Hat]

I'm thick and shit at football.

[The Mantis]

I worked beside Tom Hendrie for years and I sort of knew Terry Christie. They both had success with multiple clubs. They always said it was better to work with part time players as they usually had a career outside football. Often they were professionals or self-employed tradesmen but either way they knew a bit more than your average pro who had been pampered since schooldays and were more receptive to understanding what was required of them on the pitch.

[Alan Stubbs]

Don't think it comes down to the intelligence levels of individual players. Luis Suarez clearly has the mental age of a five year old, apart from happening to be a genius on the park.

As others have covered well though, there is a chronic culture of anti-intellectualism in British football and I can't see how that wouldn't have a negative impact on performance. Scottish football is a million times worse than England as well. It's long overdue given the money that's been floating around there for years but when you read/hear about how folk like Pochettino, Eddie Howe, Paul Clement etc go about their business, there seems to some sense of sophistication and strategy creeping in. Our game is so incestuous and archaic, it's embarrassing.

One minor example from my club that I've moaned about elsewhere is substitutions. Lennon, who is actually an alrightish kind of manager by our game's shite standards, approach to chasing a game is to take off defenders and midfielders for strikers until we have five plus players up front. This produces a wonderful brand of football whereby Grant Holt and Brian Graham literally get in each others' way and we generally have a shapeless mess of a team. The reason I bring this up is that I rarely see anything like it when I watch European football but it seems quite common here. It's hard to imagine how anyone thinks this is a good idea until you watch a game where a losing manager subs on a wing back or ball winner in midfield and gets absolutely roased every time by the mouth-breathers that make up our sports media.

It takes confidence, intelligence and a bit of know-how to challenge duff conventional wisdom and be innovative. Actively valuing stupidity and ignorance like British (particularly Scottish) football seems to can't help that to happen.