Jack Grealish

[The Red Baron]

Certainly a good example of a wasted talent.

[RobTheRover]

I'm afraid I don't know how to post pictures but here's a belter of Pirlo off his rocker...

http://www.footballerswines.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Pirlo-wine.jpg

Bravo!  Quite superb.

[RobTheRover]

Yep, I'll give you that one lads. Head not one straight.

Take Ramos out and put Claudio Cannavaro in, then.  One of my all time favourite players in any position, and a veritable midget (by today's standards) too.

[RobSlingDog]

Let the lad crack on with his life, we've all been there. He probs woke up had a walk back into town and slepted with a hound on the beech just to top it of! YOLO.

[RobTheRover]

Rob, have you just been watching The Inbetweeners Movie, by any chance?

[GazLaz]

I'm surprised Sean Thornton hasn't been mentioned yet.

That's one of the biggest myths ever. Did anyone ever witness this talent at any point ever?

[RobSlingDog]

Rob, have you just been watching The Inbetweeners Movie, by any chance?

Haha, I haven't seen it for a while but now come to think of it, it does sound alot like that!

[The Red Baron]

I'm surprised Sean Thornton hasn't been mentioned yet.

That's one of the biggest myths ever. Did anyone ever witness this talent at any point ever?

The Villa League Cup game, perchance?

I don't think he was a world beater, but I'll hazard a guess he'd have had a decent career in football if he'd sorted his head out.

[Mustapha-Dump]

But doesn't it all make a mockery out of all the sports science, dieticians and individual fitness programs? And more importantly a mockery of massive wages and ticket prices.

if he was doing it mid season then yes it would, but in my opinion they are as entitled to a week off as any body else, whatever there wage packet.

[drfchound]

Let the lad crack on with his life, we've all been there. He probs woke up had a walk back into town and slepted with a hound on the beech just to top it of! YOLO.

Can i make it clear at this point that i was in no way involved.

[BillyStubbsTears]

And what about Chris Beech?

[Al4475]

Coming back to great world class players - it still never ceases to amaze me how many top english/british players have a go in italy, france, spain or germany! Obviously the monetry perks of the pl are better (?) Than abroad - but the really good players don't come here generally at the peak of there careers - they come here for big money past their best or big money prior to getting themselves another big money move abroad! I have no idea why this is apart from the £ signs! Maybe the brits prefer the fact that drinking big and suchlike off season is generally more acceptable than elsewhere!

[drfchound]

DrfcHound

Quite the contrary actually. I would LOVE us to produce players who are better than those of other nations.

It's just that we don't.  We TELL ourselves that our players are as good as those of other nations. But the evidence over 45 years of tournament results is that we have never produced a group of players who have been in the top 3 in the world or the top 2 in Europe. On average, we produce about the 10th best team in Europe and the 16th best in the world.

I'm not scratting around looking for reasons to slag our players off. It's there in the record. Whatever one's opinion of individuals (and we all differ) the fact is that we simply do not produce many players who excel on the highest stage and we certainly do not produce teams who do so.

But we comfort ourselves by telling ourselves that we DO produce top rate players, and it is just bad luck (injuries, cheating foreigners, widths of posts, ale) that prevents them from showing that they are as good as everyone else.

Claiming that Tony Adams as an example of a top-rate player kind of makes the point for me. No other major footballing power in Europe would look upon Adams as the best that they have produced in a couple of generations. As I said, maybe he would have been if he'd kept off the ale, but we'll never know. 

Believe me, I would really like to be able to eat humble pie on this in a few years time and say that I was too pessimistic on English football. But experience suggests that it'll be the same round of build-em-up and see-em-fail again.

BST, first of all, please just call me hound.
To get this right, i never called Adams to be the best we have produced in a couple of generations, i just said that he could arguably be classed to be as good as some of those that you had listed.
I also think that John Terry could be in a list of top centre backs.

As for not producing world class players, well i have to say that both Gerrard and Beckham would be high on most peoples list of top players.
Beckham did play for some seriously big teams and Gerrard probably would have done if he hadn't stayed loyal to Liverpool.

As i said and you agreed with though, it is all about opinion.

Also, to make it clear, my opinion of the England national team is that we are probably only good enough to make tournament quarter finals on a regular basis and maybe squeeze a semi final out of it now and again.
I do not have delusions of us doing better than that.

The odd thing is with football though that we often look at players who are playing against us and rate them higher than our boys, even at club level.
It is a bit like watching the Rovers and the opposition get a free kick in a dangerous place or get a corner.
We nearly always hold our breath and kind of expect them to score.
We don't get anywhere near as tense when we get the free kick or corner but i bet the opposition fans do.
Maybe familiarity breeds a bit of contempt?

[Copps is Magic]

I'm afraid I don't know how to post pictures but here's a belter of Pirlo off his rocker...

http://www.footballerswines.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Pirlo-wine.jpg

The man is clearly struggling to stand on two legs... So he's sittin on four.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Hound

I wasn't aiming the Adams discussion at you. Apologies if it came across that way.

I partly agree with you about us never quite judging our own players rationally, but I have a slightly different take on it. I think as a rule, we (football fans in general) worry that our general quality is not as high as other teams' but that we over-estimate how good our best players are.

Billy Sharp is a perfect example. He's the best striker we have had in 50 years but objectively he's not a top quality player. 4 years ago the concensus of opinion on here was that he was comfortably Premier League quality and was worth £3-4M. That was a hopelessly over-optimistic evaluation of both his ability and his value.

I think as a nation we do the same with our best players. WE think Gerrard and Beckham and Adams and Terry are in the top few globally of their generation. But while they were undoubtedly very, very good, I don't think you'd find many non-English people who would put them in the very top bracket. Every top footballing nation produces players of that quality. And many of those players make the true step up to genuine greatness by producing their best on the very highest stage. In the closing stages of major tournaments. Which is something that very, very few England players have done in the past 40-50 years.

The team of 1990 did it briefly. Lineker was in the very top bracket. Platt, Gascoigne, Pearce, Walker, Beardsley and Waddle stepped up and were on a par with most others in the tournament.

Similarly in 1996, with the huge benefit of being at home, Shearer, Gascoigne, Sheringham, Adams, Neville etc were excellent.

But that's as good as we've ever been and in neither case were those players unquestionably the best in the tournament.

Either side of that, we've had very, very few players who would be classed as being in the top 30-40 of any tournament. Which kind of suggests that those players really aren't that good.

[swintonrover]

Aye, all these top class players don't drink, it's what makes them better...

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kh8tHkN7RUg/UCohWKy-P7I/AAAAAAAAAKQ/IFj4HXQwcFY/s1600/Messi_Drunk.jpg

[Sammy Chung was King]

The french etc drink a glass of wine from quite a young age with they're meals, so the novelty of alcohol and getting blotto isn't there as much, they are learnt from a young age to drink sensibly, it's an education thing for me.

[bpoolrover]

Not sure it's correct that the players from abroad don't get wasted,you tube or google just about any of them and there are stories of them being pissed,maybe it's the papers that big the story up where abroad they don't