Robert Henderson
In the past few weeks England have lost three times to the All Blacks at rugby and crashed out of the World Cup with only one point from their three pool games . This week they lost for the first time ever a home cricket series against Sri Lankra . During the winter the Ashes series was lost 5-0.
What is going wrong? The answer is beautifully simple. English top-flight team sport is suffering from the same sickness that England as a whole is carrying: it is the victim of immigration. Our three most popular team sports , football, cricket and rugby union, have all opened their doors to any number of foreigners and foreign players, coaches and owners have flooded in.
Football
Of the three most popular teams sports, football is the most advanced in terms of denying places to young English players a, managers and coaches. This is unsurprising because of the twenty Premiership clubs starting the 2014/15 season ten are foreigner owned, as are twelve of the twenty two Championship clubs. Foreign owners will have no concern for the wellbeing of English football, merely a desire to be successful at all costs either from a desire to make money or for the prestige footballing success brings on the world stage.
The practice of excluding English players and managers can be found throughout the professional English football pyramid, but is seen at its most blatant in the Premier League where less than a third of the players regularly starting are English. This compares with an average of around a third of players being foreign in the top divisions throughout Europe.
The level below the Premier League, the Championship, is also heavily infiltrated by foreigners and contains one team, Watford, which starkly demonstrates exactly how quickly English players can be squeezed out. Watford were taken over by the Italian Pozzo family who also own the Italian Udinese club and Spanish Grenada club. The English manager Sean Dyche – who has just led Burnley to the Premiership – was quickly replaced with the Italian Gianfranco Zola. This was followed by the ridding of the club of most of the established English players and their replacement with foreigners, most being on-loan Italians from Udinese
In addition, the very successful Watford Academy was downgraded from category 1 to category 3 . This means that Watford can no longer sign boys from nine onwards and can now do so only from the age of 12 and may no longer compete in the U-21 League which gives experience against the likes of Man U and Arsenal. This of itself will mean fewer English youngsters coming through the Watford system, even assuming that young English players will now reach the Watford Academy for it could become a training ground for foreign imports from Udinese and Grenada.
Cricket
County cricket is increasingly staffed by foreign players and managers. Foreign ownership does not really come into the picture because county clubs are private members clubs and as such cannot be purchased. Nor is there the money or public profile in county cricket to make any attempt to change this situation worthwhile.
With cricket it is difficult to give an exact percentage for foreign players because so many flit in and out of the county game, as they arrive for particular competitions such as the T20 or contract for far less than a full season with a county because they want to play in other T20 leagues or go away with their national sides.
An idea of the scale of the foreign invasion into county cricket can be gleaned from the Playfair Cricket Annual, which gives pen portraits of the players registered for each county for the coming season. By my count the 2014 annual shows thirty-seven players marked as not qualified to play for England because they were born outside the UK and have either played for Test teams other than England or have not played for another country but have not lived long enough in England to qualify through residence . A further forty-five who were born outside the UK but have qualified through residence. Many of the latter group are those who have had a substantial first class career, including in some cases, Test experience , outside of the UK . Few will want or have a realistic chance of playing for England. They include the likes of the Australian Test player Phil Jacques and the New Zealand Test player Hamish Marshall. The two groups produce a combined figure of eighty-two foreigners either disbarred from playing for England or very unlikely to do so at the beginning of the 2014 season. Experience shows that additional foreign players will be employed as the season progresses. It would not be unreasonable to imagine the eighty-three foreigners at the beginning of the 2014 season will swell to one hundred plus by the end of the season.
There are eighteen first class county sides which gives 191 places in their first teams. The vast majority of the foreigners, whether qualified or not for England, will be regulars in their county sides, not least because counties are very reluctant to drop a foreign player who has cost them a good deal of money to hire . On average there will be three or four foreigners in each county side for Championship matches, that is, about 40% of the total places. The percentage of foreign players in the limited over games, especially the T20, will probably be higher.
Rugby Union
Rugby Union is a Johnny-come-lately to the paid sporting ranks, the game only turning professional in 1995. But it is made up for lost time when it comes to the foreign player stakes , although not to the extent of the football influx, the percentage of foreigners into the Avia Premiership being around a third rather than the two thirds or more of the Premier League.
Football, cricket and rugby are the main team sports but what has happened to them can be found to varying degrees in all teams sports which have any degree of popularity in Britain and individual sports where either there are occasional team events organised on a national team basis such as the Davis Cup (tennis ) or Ryder Cup (golf) or the sport carries enough popularity and prestige for those controlling the sport to engineer English or British representation at a high level, no matter how bogus that is. Think of Greg Rusedski (tennis) or Zola Budd (athletics). In principle they should be treated as I suggest sports such as football and cricket should be treated.
How foreign players are distributed
The raw number of foreigners is not the only concern. In any team sport certain positions are considered to be the most important. In football those positions are the goalkeeper, centre-backs and strikers. In rugby union it is the scrum half and fly half and full back, in cricket the opening batsmen and fast bowlers. The foreign imports disproportionately fill those positions. The consequence is that England teams are left with few players to choose from when selecting people to fill those positions, for example, the England football team has very few goalkeepers and strikers to choose from at present.
In the case of cricket, it is almost invariably the case that foreign players are given the plum places in the batting order and if pace bowlers use of the new ball. That means English batsmen get pushed down the batting order and English pace bowlers often do not get use of the new ball.
The demoralising effect on English players
English players will be subject to the politically correct propaganda which the British political elite have institutionalised within English society. The mistreatment by the state, the mainstream media and employers of those label led as racist, homophobic or chauvinist has created considerable fear amongst the British public, who will often voice politically correct views which they do not subscribe to because they are afraid. The fear also creates a sense of disconnection with the country which they come from, because they think, rightly, that they cannot praise England without shrieks of racist hurtling in their direction To that can be added the deracination of English children through the emasculation of the English school curriculum so that it does not provide them with their culture history while incessantly promoting any culture and history other than that of the English.
The fact that as budding elite sportsmen they are of necessity forced to live in a world with a great deal of racial and ethnic variety will reinforce the sense of disconnection and isolation from their own culture and history. Even if English players did want the situation to change and see the foreigners kicked out of their sport there is little they could safely do. If they did wish to protest against the denial of opportunity to them because of foreign players, every one of them will know that if they voice criticism of the influx of foreigners their career will be at best damaged and at worst ended. It is a toxic environment to work in, especially toxic in clubs where the playing personnel and often the management and coaching staff are foreign.
In such an environment , the focus of English players will almost certainly be concentrated upon their own playing careers to the exclusion of any wider interest social or national interest in what is happening to their sport.
The selection of English national sides
Pedantically the selection of players who were not English to play for England has been going on for a long time. That is particularly true of cricket where the Indian Ranjitsinji was first selected in the 1890. But foreigners in an England shirt were rarities until the 1980s. Cricket led the way with a horde of South Africans, Australians and West Indians and the odd New Zealander . By the 1990s England were regularly putting out sides with four or five foreigners, people such as Alan Lamb, Robin Smith, Graeme Hick, Andy Caddick and Devon Malcolm. The selectors’ obsession with foreigners waned somewhat in the first half of the 2000s, but strengthened again from 2005 onwards. Three of the four most recent England Test caps have been unambiguously foreign, that is, they were both born abroad and spent the large majority of their childhoods in the country of their birth: Robson (Australian), Jordan (West Indian), Balance (Zimbabwean ) . On the managerial side, the Zimbabweans Duncan Fletcher and Andy Flower between them held the position of head coach for all but two years of the period 1999-2014.
In the case of football most of the foreign input has occurred on the managerial front. Since 2001, the England side has had foreign managers (Sven-Goran Eriksson and Fabio Capello) for a combined total of nine years. Nonetheless, there are signs that the FA are now willing to grab players from anywhere . Last season feelers were put out to get the Belgium youngster Adnan Januzaj to play for England on the grounds of his residency in England. Januzai rebuffed the approaches but the attempt demonstrates how the FA have thrown in the towel when it comes to not selecting foreigners.
Rugby Union began to be really promiscuous with the selection of foreigners in the England side around the time the game turned professional (1995). The squad which toured New Zealand in 2014 contained South Sea Islanders Manusamoa Tuilagiand and Semesa Rokoduguni , the South African Brad Barritt and the New Zealander Dylan Hartley.
What can be legally done?
While Britain remains within the EU only players from outside the EU can be excluded from English professional sport. Moreover, this is weakened to some degree by the ability of players from outside the EU to gain EU state passports. Nonetheless a blanket ban on non-EU imports would have considerable although varying effects, viz:
1. Football would probably be least affected because all European states play professional football, most to a decent standard. Nonetheless, the available talent pool would be massively reduced and make it much more difficult for clubs to claim that the players they were bringing were of exceptional talent.
2. Cricket would be the most affected for the simple reason that cricket is not played to a professional standard outside of England within the EU.
3. Rugby would come somewhere between cricket and football because only France and Italy play the game to international level, although there are a few talented individuals outside of those two countries.
What about foreign ownership of English sporting clubs? This only seriously affects English football of the big three English team sports. Even as things are foreigners from outside the EU could be excluded if the political will was there. Things would be more difficult with foreigners from within the EU, but it is debatable whether the free movement of capital rule throughout the Single Market would be a bar to preventing the sale of English clubs to foreigners within the EU. Certainty the other large EU countries manage to prevent their top clubs falling into foreign hands.
All that is required to substantially restrict the number of foreigners coming into English professional sport is for the British government to ban every would-be owner from outside the EU and every manager, coach and player from outside the EU from working in Britain. The only thing which has prevented this happening is the ghastly ideological commitment to free trade (including in practice the free movement of peoples) to which the British political elite has succumbed.
Apart from banning non-EU foreigners, much might be done if politicians, the media and fans constantly challenged English sporting clubs over the number of foreigners they employ. Sponsors are sensitive to changes in public wants and might well shun clubs if the public atmosphere was strongly against the employment of foreigners. The same would be true of media outlets which earned their money from sales of their product and advertising. If fans took up the issue they could bring pressure on clubs by not buying the club merchandise or making it clear with chants and banners that they wanted English players in their team. But to be successful I this tactic does require the mainstream parties to take up the issue and start the ball rolling. In these politically correct times the general public needs to be reassured that they will not find the police feeling their collars if they start chanting slogans such as “English players for English teams.”
The perfect solution would be for Britain to leave the EU. Then every foreign manager, coach and
National sides must be national to have a point
The claiming of people as natives of a country when they manifestly are anything but makes a mockery of the very idea of national sporting sides. There really is no point in an English cricket side comprised of three or four Southern Africans , an Australian and a West Indian or an England football team managed by a Swede or Italian.
To keep professional team sports healthy in England what is needed is a concentration on English owners, managers, coaches and players in our major team sports. Only by keeping the personnel English will there be a large enough pool of talent to draw on for the England national teams, but also because it will mean the players are living week by week in a thoroughly English atmosphere and that will accustom them to thinking not only of themselves but of the English national interest.
Such a change would also have a beneficial effect on the audiences for the sports. They would go to see English players playing, managed by English managers and clubs owned or controlled by those raised in the country. Team sports such as football, cricket and rugby are not just games as liberals would have us believe, they are trials of strength, physical prowess and nerve. . If England started winning consistently that also would boost national sentiment.
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See also
https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/02/15/is-it-in-the-blood-and-the-hypocrisy-of-the-media/
