Oh would you just...

...stop wingeing Graham Taylor. Being the prophetic, revolutionary man that he is, our favourite turnip-resembling ex-England gaffer (left) was on Sky Sports News today bemoaning the demise of youth development by the FA. Apparently due to the employment of 15,000 Ozzie stoners to build our national stadium, plans to build an academy in the countryside somewhere have been scrapped. Fair enough. Sounds shit.

But then he had to say it didn't he. He just had to. "Too many foreign players in the Premiership stifling emerging talent blah blah blbl yadda".

Either i'm Bill Murray or we had this conversation last year. And the year before that. And about 10 years ago.

England's strongest XI is currently the finest it has been in decades. In fact, if it wasn't for the FA's other brilliant decision- to appoint a strange swinging Swede to coach out national team; and then give the job to his token northern friend- we would all be hailing this as our 'golden generation'. This being the generation that coincided with the dramatic influx of foreigners into the Premiership. Before the foreigners turned up, Graham Taylor was busy playing Tony Daley on the left wing.

Take Theo Walcott's second goal for the under-21s tonight, in which we beat Germany 3-0 to get to the U21 European Championships:


An Arsenal forward cutting in from the left wing, opening up his body and curving the ball into the right hand corner. You can almost hear Theo shouting 'Va Va Voom' as he wheels away to celebrate. Who do you think tought him to finish like that? (And don't listen to Peter "Clooney" Beardsley saying it was 'self-taught') I'll give you a clue Graham, it wasn't Justin Hoyte.

And for the record Mr Taylor, stick this in your pipe and smoke it. Other than Walcott, Wayne Rooney, Aaron Lennon, Dean Ashton, Micah Richards, Kieran Richardson (ok, i take that one back), Nigel Reo-Coker, Darren Bent, Anton Ferdinand, ...are all 22 or younger. So I'm thinking we'll be alright.

I'm off to bemoan the introduction of nets to goals.