Sport
Plumbing for talent
Published 29 November 2007
"English" immigrants can solve England's selection problems
We've just had another meeting of the FA's Football Task Force. You never know how you come to be invited on to these things. Tony Blair's first party at No 10, that was a mystery, and so was the Queen's garden party. I think they got me mixed up with Russell Davies or Russell Harty or Darcey Bussell.
All the FA said, when they rang, was that as my Bumper Book of Football is now reprinting, in time for Christmas, it suggests I know a bit about the game. As much as Alastair Campbell who, as a Burnley fan, hasn't seen a lot of top-notch soccer; or John Birt, who will go on about the time he played at Wembley. It was only a bloody charity game, but in his mind it's become a World Cup final.
Luckily, he's gone off fact-finding. I'm chairman, and at our first meeting I suggested that as he was appointed for his brilliance at blue-sky thinking, he should get himself off to Man City and then Coventry, do some research, take as long as he likes, I'll sign his exes.
Our fourth member is Philip Gould. I've got him settled with his flip charts, working out immigration patterns for the next ten years, based on average annual new arrivals of five million. Then he has to predict the fertility rates of the leading countries from whence they will come, such as Poland, Croatia, Ghana, Nigeria, etc. Finally, he has to correlate the figures with their latest Fifa world rankings. His laptop is buzzing.
Our final member, whom I can identify only as "Tubby", is a top barrister who likes eating and travelling. He's now off round the world, with a lot of brown envelopes, talking to international lawyers and football officials in developing countries.
It means that me and Big Al have been mainly sitting around eating Fox's Sports biscuits and reminiscing about the glory days of Burnley and Carlisle United and the old Third Division (North). He once went to Carlisle's ground, Brunton Park, on a coach - and lost one of his shoes! Hilarious. He looked all over, but it never turned up.
I've been telling him that Ralph Coates wore a wig. "Fucking fibber," he replied. I know because I saw Ralphy take it off in the Spurs dressing room. Apparently, when he first started at Burnley he was determined to model himself on Bobby Charlton.
That was John Birt on the phone. He's just realised that Argentina also play in sky blue. Can he go there next? I said yes.
The FA has set us two targets, one short-term, one long-term, to solve the problems of England's lack of talent. The first is very secret, so not a word, or it will bugger up Tubby's work.
The plan is that players such as Didier Drogba, after they've been here a while, can automatically be naturalised English. After all, Croatia's centre-forward Eduardo was born in Brazil and lived there until he was 15, while Jack Charlton was always finding people who had an Irish granny they never knew about.
It could be expensive, paying transfer fees to bodies like the Ivory Coast FA and lawyers for the right documents, but the FA has loads of money - and is desperate. We were working on five years' residency, but Tubby is confident five minutes will do, in fact straight off the plane, if the money's right.
In the long term, our new immigrants should do it for us. Philip's figures show that the Polish plumbers are already breeding fast and will provide 1,765 brilliant young players a month by 2012. The future's bright, the future's Blue. So I've told John, to keep him happy.
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