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19 September 2013updated 20 Sep 2013 11:39am

Football and feminism

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote once: ‘There is nothing I hate more than a masculine man.’

By Hunter Davies

Could feminism be a cause of England’s rubbishness at football? Greg Dyke, the chairman of the FA, did say there could be a number of reasons.

However, he seemed to suggest the main problem was that the Premiership was full of foreigners. Only 32 per cent of the starting line-ups last season were native English horny-handed sons of Albion. Not Albion Rovers, the Scottish team from Coatbridge, currently in the Scottish League Two, but Albion meaning England, as in “perfidious Albion”, though Albion, from the Greek, originally referred to our whole island. We’ll start again.

English players are a minority in their own major league: no argument there. But this is a result, not a cause, of the problem. It clearly limits Roy Hodgson when picking 11 English lads who can kick straight, and mostly to each other, but in the 1970s and 1980s, before the Premiership, the vast majority of our players were English – and did it help us win anything? Did it buggery.

So is it the Prem managers? Only five are English, so why should they care about encouraging young English talent if it’s cheaper and easier to buy someone half decent from eastern Europe, rather than east Essex?

Or the coaches? They’re supposed to spot local lads while they’re still in nappies, then knock them into shape. Again, the facts indicate there’s a problem. We have just 1,161 licensed coaches in England, compared to 12,720 in Spain and 5,500 in Germany. Something’s wrong here.

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And yet for 20 years, since the Prem began, our coaching and academy system has been overhauled every three years; millions have been poured in; state-of-the-art training grounds have been built; we have more video suites than Hollywood and coaches with badges coming out of their arses. And where has all this got us? Exactly.

Coaching methods go in and out of fashion. They follow someone, or some system that seems to have cracked it, till it no longer works. Coaching methods are hard to transfer from one country or even one club to another. What works with one person might not work with another. You can’t bottle it, or even describe it. But it has to be done. Raw talent can’t be allowed to lie there, playing with itself. Oh, it’s all such a mystery.

Our Prem players are paid millions, even the cloggers, so you would think simple economics would play a part in these hard times –more, not fewer, young players should be coming through. The obvious explanation: lack of talent.

These things go in cycles. Look at Belgium, with a population of only 11 million, producing excellent players, running away with their World Cup group. Greece, also a country of 11 million, won the Euro 2004 and Denmark, which is even smaller, with a population of five and a half million, won it in 1992. For England, population 53 million: nada since 1966. Our time must come, I constantly tell myself.

What if the real reason is that our players don’t want to win? The handful who do come through get carried away with their flash cars, convinced they’ve made it. But when the knocks come, they are unwilling to fight harder, as Gareth Bale did. Spoiled, our modern youth, convinced that they’re owed a living.

More men watched The Great British Bake Off on telly than watched Arsenal against Fenerbahçe – 1.92 million as against 1.72 million. It’s a victory for feminism, so my wife immediately declared. Not sure about her logic but it’s awfully worrying.

It was, though, a very boring game, with the result never in doubt.

“Don’t forget,” she added, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote once: ‘There is nothing I hate more than a masculine man.’”

It used to be thought pretty sissy when I were a lad, blokes cooking, pinnies flapping. Now they’re all at it. My son and my son-inlaw both do the cooking in their families. Foony people.

Instead of being out in the street playing football under the lamp posts till bedtime, as I was, as nature intended, our soppy new generation is either in the kitchen or slumped in front of the telly watching other men cooking.

Greg, you’ll have to get a grip.

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