English Women's Football: A Comment

I read this today on my forum [http://fw1.no-ip.com/the_list ] and I just had to reply and then post it here. Usual stream of consciousness ensued, I wonder if it makes sense to anyone?

Popscene wrote:

So I was watching the women's world cup today and I was thinking that it was a shame England didn't qualify having lost 2-0 to France in a home and away playoff. However, after looking at England's record against the teams that did qualify I'm almost glad they're still at home. England haven't beaten one of the sixteen teams that qualified since 1995 (Nigeria 3-2). In fact since that time our record against those teams is Played 30, Won 1, Drawn 1, Lost 28. Nice.

So why are we so shit?

Why is it that the home of football can't put together a decent team of women players. Are we really that backwards that there is no support for half the population to play our national sport?

My rambling reply:

I blame it on our culture of wannabee popstars and celebrity obsessed girls and boys. Why play football when you can watch David Beckham and drool over him whilst looking forward to watching Pop Idol afterwards? to get people playing you need to play at school, but schools are still selling off playing fields to afford to keep going, teachers no longer want to commit to extra-curricular activities because of the pressure of the education system on them, if they do they face being sued by our litiguous parental blame culture for anything that might happen to little Johnny or Jessica. It upsets me. Rugby is actually in decline, a real big decline. The sport that our country is best at and may win a world cup at has a declining grassroots support. That's as wrong as our women being rubbish and undersupported at football.

So many people tell me that at school (in the old days) they did 2 sessions of games a week at school and had Wednesday afternoons for playing the games as well. Now you have one session a week for it all if you're lucky. No training, no support or nurture for those that are new to a sport. It's always focussing on the kids that are already talented, which is probably because Mum and Dad packed them off to a youth team to play because they new the school would fail them. How come they stopped all these games sessions. Suddenly they have lots of new subjects to study, which must have taken their place. Subjects that are low-brow and pointless. I'm thinking that these new subjects appeared to allow you to take a GCSE and A-Level which leads you all the way to an ex-Polytechnic to study them. In summation the England Women's Football team are rubbish because the government allowed Polytechnics to become Universities. The ex-polytechnics with their new found credibility made-up pointless lightweight degrees that people felt were worth studying and had the same respect as other established degrees. These new degrees needed lower and further education support, which meant that schools had to teach the subjects and therefore replaced sports lessons with the new subjects resulting in the decline of school and grassroots sport in the UK.