Search: ' World Cup 2006'

Stephanie Pride talks to Howard Wilkinson about the future of youth coaching in England and possible regrets he has from an illustrious career

WSC Do you feel there is still a suspicion in this country of bringing the more technical aspects of coaching into the game?
Howard Wilkinson Yes, there’s a cultural attitude which is, if you like, anti-coaching, or against having an analytical attitude to sport, and it does make life difficult because it colours everyone’s attitude. It’s come out recently when we’ve had foreign players who start to talk about the differences and make negative comparisons with the preparation they’ve been used to. It comes out with foreign coaches coming in – people like Arsène Wenger. The sort of preparation that he employs I don’t think is that much different to the sort of preparation that others would employ, nor would it be fundamentally different to that which I would employ, but because Arsène’s come in and done it, it’s had a positive influence. People say “ah well, it’s come from abroad, it must be good, it’s worked there” – and I think that’s good.

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Mike Ticher talks to Graham Kelly about the formation of the Premier League, England's World Cup bid and the possibility of a future breakaway

When the Premier League began, you maintained it would benefit football as a whole. How successful has it been?
I think in two respects it’s been very successful. Firstly, commercially. The Premier League wasn’t set up in exactly the way that I envisaged at the start. We didn’t set up the Premier League within the structure of the FA, it was set up as an autonomous company, with its own board of directors and, not unnaturally, it was jealous of its own commercial properties. So to that extent the pattern isn’t as we envisaged. But nonetheless, helped by other factors, such as the Taylor Report and the emergence of satellite television, commercially the FA Premier League, standing alone, has been spectacularly successful. The second respect is the impetus it gave to the development of players. We argued for a number of years about getting the best young players more time with the best coaches, without a great deal of success. The Football League tended to operate at the pace of the slowest club rather than the fastest. Setting up the Premier League has led indirectly to the formation of the academies, and in time, hopefully, we will see more good English players coming through.

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In last month's issue we asked for your views on England's 2006 World Cup Bid and Manchester Utd's exemption from the FA Cup. Roger Titford digests the results

Here are some early views on the burning issues culled from our reader survey in WSC No 150. We looked at the first 500 ques­tionnaires to come in and found plenty of dis­gruntlement with the FA. No change there, some might say.

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Thursday 1 The Department of Employment issue new rules on work permits. Players will be given permits for the length of their contracts rather than having their cases reviewed at the end of each season, and the rule stipulating that non-EU players must be among the top five wage earners at their clubs is scrapped. Forest's search for a manager ends with the appointment of the impressively tanned David Platt, who says: "The two months I had at Sampdoria were a massive learning curve." That's just what Sampdoria fans will have been thinking when they went down. The charges against Sol Camp≠bell for assaulting a steward after the Derby v Spurs match last autumn are dropped. Arsenal spend £3.5 million on a Brazilian full back, Silvinho, who says: "I have been following Arsenal ever since I knew they were watching me."

Friday 2 The PFA's Gordon Taylor criticises the changes to work permit rules. "We already have more foreign players than anywhere else in the world. Removing the wages criteria means you are opening the door to players who are not neccesarily top quality". Terry McDermott joins the Barnes-Dalglish dream team at Celtic as "social manager" – a highly specialised position which involves a lot of shouting and laughing plus the collecting of betting slips.

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Dear WSC
I have no time at all for deposed Ran­gers vice-chairman Donald Find­lay, but Gary Oliver’s article about him (WSC 149) was unfair in two res­pects. Findlay is Scotland’s pre-eminent defence counsel. He has defended sco­res of people accused of rape, murder, etc – including many Catholics. To extract from his long career two cases where the victims were Celtic fans is a distortion. And Findlay’s admittedly ill-judged joke that his birthday should have been on July 12th rather than St Patrick’s Day was a mutual one he had with a Catholic friend whose birthday is on the former date. The good news is that Rangers chairman David Murray has, by getting rid of Findlay, again taken strong action against sectarianism.
Ian McLean, Glasgow

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