DJKillaQueen

Sportsmen don't need to be playing for money to authenticate that drama, they just need to care. And we see this every weekend on every Sunday League pitch. For every professionally paid football player, coach, manager, there are millions more doing it all for free for no more than the love of the sport. We are about to see the first professional women's league next year. The top eight teams will be part of a summer league called the Super League and the FA and clubs involved will pay those female players up to around ?40K a year to play for them. It is designed to stop our best female players going off to America to play in their well established professional league, whilst improving our changes at international level to win a World Cup. The interesting thing to note that the pay scale is capped. Each club will only be able to pay up to four players more than ?20k per year. Now if the FA can cap female players wages...and do something to aid the female England Squad's chances of winning the World Cup in Germany next year....they can certainly do the same for the men's game. They won't of course, because things being they way they are currently brings in far too much money to the FA and clubs...and THAT'S why neither the FA, Premiership or Clubs really care about England International Football. The delusion of paying Capello more than twice what the next highest paid international manager gets is part of the smokescreen, that makes the England manager always the fall guy, instead of the FA being forced to look inward and acknowledge the real problems lie elsewhere.

I'm with KK anmd LB. Have some respect for the woman Sheepdog.

Everton are my team and if Liverpool can't beat Blackpool then I fancy Everton's chances.

The English game is a different game it's true. Hence the term 'kick and rush'....and why is that? An emphasis on fitness over skill? No..we are not producing enough skilled footballers because we coach indiviual skill out of them. And it's worth pointing out that many of the premiership stars underperformed for their national teams in the last World Cup...so there is something in the English game that doesn't help most players at international level.

Eight out so far.

Not silly at all....if cars were to drive down that bit it would be costantly jammed.

In a country where practically every child and that includes most girls too these days plays football it can not be that there is not enough talent out there. Clearly something is going very wrong at junior coaching level (that is something both Germany and Spain have changed) and then at the higher levels, no matter how good a junior is, he is never ging to be great if he doesn't get to play regular first team football at the higher clubs. So the number of foreign players is prohibitive to that (something that most fottball advisors across the world agree on). It is no accident that since the creation of the Premier League in 1992 that our results at international tournaments have dropped. As for last night's performance, it wasn't good enough. In the brief moments that England picked up the pace and passed the ball they created chances. Rooney I agree was well below par and I've never been a fan of Crouch at international level. Yes Montenegro got away wih a lot, always had 10 men behind the ball and the referee and his linesmen were pants but you still have to win games like that. And the beter teams do. We are not one of them.

Yet again a therad asking a simple question about a local road turns into a cyclist bashing thread.

Yeah I saw it too. It's an amazing rescue and likewise I hope the capsule works without a hitch for the rest of them.

One of the key problems for not pretending that all children can achieve the same is that it institutionalizes unequal expectations which mean that there is not equality of opportunity. It also allows the potential for sloppy stereotypes to be applied to children therefore limiting their life chances even if they do have the potential. Yes but pretending they are all able to achieve the same standards is equally self defeating. It's a fact of life that people are good at different things. And unequal expectations have far more to do with demographics than schooling. You can put a random mixed group of children in any school, public or state and there will be an inequality of achievement. We are not helping children by not tailoring education to recognise this fact. Equality of oppurtunity is about getting the best out of children and giving them the best future they can have if they take the opportunity. It is not about deluding children they can be something they can never be if only they work harder. In fact that attitude is responsible for the failure of too many children who leave school without basic standards of literacy and numeracy. They get left behind and there is nothing in the current system to empower them. Also there are some kids who just don't want to learn anything...or work for anything. Meanwhile the schools still using traditional methods of education continue to churn out pupils with whom these failed kids will never be able to compete for jobs. A good school system should stream but at the same time should be flexible enough so as not to lock pupils into those streams (which is perhaps where the old system failed for some pupils). Of course it also has to be taken into account that there are very few reasonably well paid but unskilled jobs compared to 30 plus years ago. The country has changed (with technology) and formal skills are more important, but that doesn't address the problem of how we deal with those who will never achieve that minimum standard at school. And there are plenty of them.

Montenegro will be thrilled. They top the group. Only the team at the top is guaranteed a place at Euro 2012. If we can't beat a team like that we don't deserve to be in the finals of any Int. Tournament. What angers me though is that all of these players every week play for their clubs at a much higher tempo without any trouble. Yet they play for England and the game has the pace of a rickshaw. It's almost as though they can't be bothered running. Dulwich Hamlet play at a quicker tempo than that. I just don't get it.

Buy a Tanglewood....they do great sound (and fast action) electro-acoustic guitars in that price range. And if you can get hold of a Laney amp to go with it then even better (although they are around ?200 second hand).

What a pile of cr@p that euro qualifier was.....pedestrian. Cr@p refeee as well.

I whole heartedly agree with everything in your post Steve. Education should be about finding what a child can do, rather than targets that pretend all children can or want or indeed need to achieve the same. Some children will make excellent doctors, others with make excellent bricklayers. Both are needed and both are employable. The times table issue is an interesting one. Many schools don't teach times tables anymore. And use of calculators have increasigly taken over. The result is that we have higher levels of poor numeracy amongst state school graduates, whereas very few children leave public school not having learned to recite times tables ;) Not hard to see which system works best.

....England play better in the second half against Montenegro.....

they would have been better venturing into the real world to gain some invaluable social skills. Pure speculation and assumption!

It wasn't Axeman and Pearson was it? (for their own protection!?)

You may well have done DJKQ, but you also came out of it* a dangerous pinko leftie subversive and an enemy of the State!!!!! (as did I) HA HA...just fell of my chair....very good MP ;) lol.... At least the old Grammar/Secondary Modern system catered for the less academically gifted with practical skills and training rather than dismissing them as failures because they didn't get so many Ucca/Pcas points. But you forget that early comprehensives also had streaming with more vocational curriculums for less academic pupils. What you are talking about is curriculum and that has changed for the absolute worst over the last 20 years with the demise of streaming. But in the 70's and 80's, the comprehensive system did well in may places, with the usual thing of those schools in more middle class areas generally doing better than those in the middle of poorer demographic areas....nothing has changed in that respect. In the grammar school system before, great if you got into a grammar school (which my father did only to be denied the chance to go to University because his parents couldn't afford to keep him) and not great if you didn't like my mother. Just as many children were failed in that system of education as what followed. I'd argue it is the drive to dumb down that has damaged the education system (the notion that all children can achieve in equal measure), whilst meanwhile the public shool system (where most of the politicians tinkering with the state school system send their kids) continues with the same traditional teaching methods it always has and continues to churn out better results on the whole. Anyway all that is off topic I know :)

this bunch of born again creationists are misguided it hardly constitutes a threat against society Anything that misinforms is dangerous as history has shown. Far more damaging to society, I would argue, have been the secular and left-wing views that brought in comprehensive education in the 70s and 80s that condemned a generation of children to substandard education for ideological reasons.7 Err the comprehensive school I went to was excellent and still is to this day. I came away with 13 O'levels and four A'levels with high grades in spite of a poor working class background and I wasn't the only one...so kind of blows your assumption there.

Faith schools exist because we live in a democracy. That's fine until you get to the postion where creationism is being taught over evolution for example (not happening in this country I think but others yes). So there are absolutely very good grounds for saying that religious dogma should not ever be part of education....no more than we teach other things at junior level, that involve shaping biased view points.

My view is that there should be no place for religious faith in schools (morality and history yes but religious dogma no)......and many parents do send their children to faith schools as an extension of impressing their own religious beliefs on their children. Standards of education are not dependent on or determined by faith.

..I could get rid of this damn cold.......

Bussing kids to sports grounds/ facilities isn't that unusual in the borough. One of the reasons why I asked the question of how much Harris pay (if at all) to use Southbank is because there are hirable grounds pitches nearer than Southbank, many of which have minimal usage during the week (as weekend league games are their primary custom). It does seem mad that the common area is out of use most of the winter because of drainage problems but at the same time we need to take on board the post that reveals that the Harris foundation hasn't yet paid anything like all of the money it pledged to it's schools. That doesn't help it's cause.

To be fair though Sean, the thing that some are concerned about is the reversal of the previous (and hard fought agreement it seems) that Harris would not use the park for it's sports along with a fear that if the school uses the park for one or two matches a week or training sessions, that one or two will soon become nine or ten and so on. It's also unfair to accuse FOPR and others who are concerned of nimbyism as well when FOPR have worked so hard for almost two decades to have the park restored to the amazing resource it is now. I think it has been made clear by James there is no plan to reverse that agreement and also Harris have absolutely kept to that which gives me the view that if they were to have a limited use of the park in the way other schools and indeed communiy groups/ Sunday league teams and others currently do they would keep to that as well. Having said that there are issues with capacity and drainage and maintenance costs. While RP might be more convenient, it may well not be cheaper for Harris to use if they were allowed to anyway (and bear in mind Harris is not at pupil capacity yet).

I think it's 'absolutely smashing' when I'm upstairs and a 'bit of alright' when I'm downstairs.......oh hang on...I don't have stairs..... I love it...and esp. Maggie Smith's ham performance......a Gosford Park for eastenders :))