Jamie Redknapp: Wants a clean slate

It's time to bring the fear factor back into the England dressing room. Someone needs to come in with no favourites and pick players on merit to start the games.

Jamie Redknapp
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English football is facing another crisis following Wednesday night's exit from Euro 2008. Sky Sports' Jamie Redknapp believes the problems lie at grass-roots level and backs Jose Mourinho as the man to pull us out of the doldrums. If only because Redknapp Senior won't be offered the job...

Ther's no getting away from it, England's Euro 2008 campaign was poor throughout. There was hardly a high point and we got what we deserved, which was to go out.

The players have to accept a lot of responsibility. To blame Steve McClaren for everything would be very wrong.

The players go out with their orders, but they have to accept some of the responsibility as their own and do their job.

Wednesday night's game was a good example. Everyone thought it was a foregone conclusion that we would go through because Croatia had already qualified and had nothing to play for.

But they played with confidence whereas some of our players looked like they were lacking belief. We lost two goals early on and after that you could see in the players' eyes that they were under pressure.

What was particularly frustrating was that there were so many uncharacteristic errors. When Steven Gerrard plays for Liverpool he can pass the ball 30 yards onto someone's foot without even thinking about it. But on Wednesday the simple things seemed hard for our players.

The lack of confidence spread across the pitch from the goalkeeper to everyone else apart from Peter Crouch. Other than him, nobody can hold their hand up and say they did the business.

After that game there was no question that McClaren had to go, but I have plenty of sympathy for him.

I've grown up around the life of a manager and I've seen how much certain things have hurt my dad. So I felt very sorry for McClaren at times because he was stood there getting all sorts of abuse, but I know how much he cares.

The FA had no choice but to sack him because the press would have hounded him out and also the general public are not silly. They want a change and we need a clean slate.

Another voice

McClaren was involved under Sven Goran Erikkson and the players have got used to hearing his voice. After so many years, it's time for another voice to be heard.

It's time to bring the fear factor back into the England dressing room. Someone needs to come in with no favourites and pick players on merit to start the games.

It's been a long time coming, but it might end up being a good thing. We saw in Scotland how they started afresh after the Berti Vogts era and they have felt the benefits of that.

People might look at the job as a poisoned chalice, but maybe it won't be this time because we can't get any worse.

Sven's era was poor and McClaren failed to get us out of a group we should have qualified from. The football was poor under both of them and in terms of style, the best manager we've had in 20 years was Glenn Hoddle - though I'm not saying we should give him the job again.

The first choice has to be Jose Mourinho because he would put belief in the players and put a smile back on their faces again. Whether we could get him and whether he would want the job is another matter.

If not, then I don't want to see Marcello Lippi or somebody who can't speak English get the post. I think that shouldn't happen because first and foremost they need to be able to speak the language.

People have mentioned Jurgen Klinsmann, but before the World Cup the German public wanted him out. They had a good campaign in their own country, but I don't think that was enough to qualify him for the England manager's job. He was commuting from his home in Los Angeles to Germany when he did that job, so he would not be my favourite.

Then you've got to look at somebody British. You would be looking at someone like Martin O'Neill and people are also mentioning Harry Redknapp.

I genuinely believe he would be very good at the job. I've worked with him and I know he would bring the best out of the players.

But I just don't think he will be offered it. I think the FA will go foreign again because that's what we do in this country. We'll see what happens, but I won't hold my breath.

Issues

Once we've got the manager in place, then there are plenty more issues we need to address.

People are saying there are too many foreign players in the English league at the moment and I would agree with that.

But I would look at it as a challenge and say to the young English players that are coming through that if they are good enough and they work hard enough, they will make it.

When Alex Ferguson brought the likes of Beckham, Scholes and the Nevilles through at Manchester United those players didn't give up, even though players like Eric Cantona and other foreign stars were in the team.

They embraced the challenge, they watched Cantona training every day and they decided they wanted to be as good as he was.

Our young players need to learn from the foreign players and I don't feel young Englishmen work hard enough at the basics.

In my last couple of years of playing football, I used to look out on the training pitch when training was finished and I would never see young players out there practising.

It would baffle me. And I think the young Spanish players and the young African players want it more than the young English players. They are going to have to work as hard as the Cesc Fabregases of this world or they are not going to make it.

We want to have a high-standard Premier League with all the best players from around the world for the fans to enjoy.

Would Arsenal fans prefer to have young English players who can't pass the ball properly or would they prefer to have Fabregas, Hleb, Rosicky and Adebayor knocking it around beautifully? Every Arsenal fan would rather watch the team they've got now.

So the young English players have got to change their mentality and rise to the challenge. They've got to want to win and they've got to learn to enjoy the game.

The coaching has also got to change at grass-roots level. I go to watch young kids play and you see mums and dads on the sidelines shouting 'kick him, get it forward, boot it'. It's wrong.

Kids end up putting too much emphasis on kicking it long. But that mentality doesn't work in international football and we saw on Wednesday when we were kicking it up to Crouch that it won't win you anything.

We've got everything we need to produce top players in this country and the infrastructure is already in place to produce talent.

But until we get our kids enjoying playing good football, we're not going to be producing the players and we are going to be facing up to a very dark future.