December 26 – The United Nations of Chelsea
AS the whole nation picks gloomily over the wreckage of England’s Euro 2008 qualifying campaign everybody from Sir Trevor Brooking to Uncle Tom Cobley is partly blaming the influx of foreign players into the Premiership for the Three Lions failure to qualify for the finals.
Arsene Wenger has been blamed for the demise of the England national team because his slick and exciting team contains barely a sniff of an Englishman, and he regularly sends out entire teams with no English players in them.
On this day in 1999 we had a glimpse of this all-foreign future when Chelsea sent out a team that contained not one single British player for their match with Southampton at the Dell.
With Graeme Le Saux injured, Chris Sutton suffering from flu, and Dennis Wise’s wife due to give birth, manager Gianluca Vialli (also foreign) started with De Goey, Ferrar, Babayaro, Thome, Leboeuf, Petrescu, Poyet, Deschamps, Di Matteo, Flo and Ambrosetti.
In another, even more depressing glimpse of the future, Vialli’s foreign legion won the match 2-1 – Chelsea’s first away win in the Premier League for three months.
For the record Saints’ starting XI contained seven British players: Paul Jones, Jason Dodd, Dean Richards, Francis Benali, Matt Le Tissier, Matt Oakley and James Beattie, and an eighth, Kevin Davies came on as well.
At the time Chelsea’s all-foreign team caused waves in the English game and sparked many of the same proclamations that we seem to be hearing now about it all being a very sad indictment for English football. It also brought up all the questions that seem to be posed in every newspaper column about how to remedy the problem.
Should we have a quota of English players in each squad? Should we re-think the academy system? Should we employ different coaching methods with the kids? Well, we are not going to give you the answers, mainly because we don’t have them.
What we do have is more mildly interesting football nostalgia, and it will be right here at the same time tomorrow so check it out.
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