It’s funny how a chat in a pub can reveal things. Like potential racism in the Football Association and in previous and present England managers…
Yet that’s just what cropped up last night while my mate (@BS6651) and I were discussing England strikers while watching the game against Hungary. It might sound a little farfetched. The FA and England managers racist? Surely not? But look at the evidence…
Think of some of the decent strikers in the last 20 years and many of them are black. We thought of Ian Wright, Andy Cole, Dion Dublin, Stan Collymore and more recently Darren Bent, Gaby Agbonlahor, Carlton Cole, Bobby Zamora and Jermain Defoe. Christ, even Dalian Atkinson was mentioned, though not by me!
What do they all have in common? They score(d) goals, of course, in abundance in many cases. That – and the fact that none of them have really been given a fair chance at international level. But why?
Dalian Atkinson formed a decent partnership with Dean Saunders at Aston Villa, scoring 36 goals for the club and 86 in his career. Ok, not so brilliant but not bad, not bad at all. His international reward was one cap for the England B team.
Ian Wright is an Arsenal legend of course. 128 goals in 221 games is testament to that. His career stats read 305 goals in 596 games. That is a striker of the highest quality. Why then does he have only 33 England caps, of which only 17 were starts? Any other striker with that record would have been pushing 50+ caps and have scored more than nine international goals.
Andy Cole has suffered even more. Despite a career record of 270 goals in 621 games, including League, FA Cup and Champions League winners medals (not to mention Manchester United’s unprecedented Treble in 1999), Cole has just 15 England caps, few of them as starter, and only one goal. From 1997 to 2000 he scored more than 20 League goals three seasons running. So why, again, the lack of international reward?
Stan Collymore has a less impressive record and an even worse reputation as a man. But during his pomp he was a striker to be feared. In the League alone he scored 99 goals in 251 games throughout his career, his best period playing for Nottingham Forest and Liverpool, for whom he scored 82 goals across four seasons. Number of England caps? Just three. And no goals.
Dion Dublin is less prolific but his importance on the pitch, particularly for Aston Villa, should not be underestimated – plus he has a better record than Emile Heskey, one of Capello’s recent favourites. He still scored 183 League goals in 623 games in his career and yet has only four England caps and no goals.
In more recent times, the likes of the previously mentioned Bent, Zamora, Agbonlahor and Defoe have had impressive seasons, not least Darren Bent, but all have struggled to start for their country. Defoe has had the most success with 43 caps and 12 goals so it’s perhaps unfair to say he has suffered, though he still struggles to start games. The rest really have struggled to get picked or play.
So is it cos they is black? Are the FA and successive England managers ever so slightly racist and biased towards England’s white strikers?
No, probably not. It’s far more likely the players named have been unfortunate enough to play in the same eras as Alan Shearer, Teddy Sheringham, Michael Owen and Wayne Rooney. But still…it makes you think. Especially when you’ve had one too many watching the current side struggle to beat Hungary!
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It’s an interesting theory, but I suspect we could come up with a similar list of white players who never really got the England chance they deserved.
Rather than inherently racist, I think the FA is just inherently incompetent; time after time players have been given an odd cap here or there and then dropped for whichever player is “established” in that position, irrespective of form.
If the FA and successive England managers only had the courage to pick players and stick with them for a sensible number of games, rather than instantly dropping them again when they don’t score a debut hat-trick…
I’d like to write a post about inherent FA incompetence but it would either be too long or too damn obvious!
There is one lumbering, some would say rather clumsy spanner in the works of this theory. Emile Heskey England’s legendary battering ram, wasn’t he given every opportunity to shine at international level? Damn it he had to do Capello a favour and retire so that he could put himself out of his own misery.
I prefer to call Heskey the exception that proves the rule…for a great number of things, as it happens!
I don’t think it’s inherent racism or even accidental racism, I think that like all sides your face has to fit and with many strikers, white, black, green or blue they have a tendency to be more emotional, more stroppy and probably more likely to cause managers hair yanking boughts of frustration and stress.
The Arsenal back 5 of the early to mid 90′s was all English and all playing at the very peak of the game yet how often did we ever see a Seamen, Winterburn, Keown, Adams & Dixon line up at international level?
Players like Stuart Pearce are picked because the press and the fans want them even if a settled back 5 that play together at club level would have been infitely better for the national side.
In my opinion no England manager since Sir Alf has had the balls to really pick the side they wanted. Sir Alf played without wingers and got slated for it, without Greaves and got slated for, yet he won the big pot and got knighted for it.
Oh and for what it’s worth, Dalian Atkinson was a fine striker..ahem..
All fair points…bar that last one, of course…