It is wrong that Roy has to rely on rookies

AFTER a World Cup to forget, Roy Hodgson now finds himself at the coalface of English football with a squad that is a damning indictment of the lack of depth available to the England manager. We simply lack options.

This is not an attack on the players themselves, far from it. Over the past 12 months we have seen a really exciting group of youngsters emerge and no doubt many of them will go on to have fine international careers with England. But they should not have to be the ones fast-tracked into the senior squad when many of them are not even first-team regulars for their club. Calum Chambers, John Stones, and Fabian Delph are all making their way through club football but are now being thrust into the England squad because of the lack of talent out there. Chambers has made an excellent start to his Arsenal career but he has featured in just five games for a top-four club.

If you look at what’s available, and form, then he deserves to be in the England squad. But at 19 and having never played for the Under 21s, it’s worrying we have to call on him already. It’s because of the lack of candidates that he has been given his chance.

John Stones (right) is another exciting defensive talent but he started just 15 times in the league for Everton last season and it still feels very soon for him.

I was 25 when I first played for England and had already played half a dozen seasons before I got called up. There always seemed to be an abundance of players and before the Premier League arrived it was as if you had to play at least 100 games before you even came into consideration. Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard and Ashley Cole won 327 caps between them but, if you exclude Wayne Rooney’s 95 appearances, that’s more than the number of caps won by the rest of the latest squad combined. That is a lot of experience gone from the dressing room.

There is a lot of excitement around Raheem Sterling, Daniel Sturridge, Luke Shaw, Ross Barkley and Adam Lallana and Hodgson is unlucky that three of those players are unavailable to him now. But it’s almost as if we have skipped a generation. Gerrard and Lampard retired from internationals at the ages of 34 and 36 respectively but most of their potential replacements are more than 10 years their junior. Whatever happened to the next batch of players, who would be 27 or 28 now? It’s great to give youth a chance, but you need balance in your squad and we don’t have that. Roy says he wants us to develop our young players in the same way Germany has but we are still a long way short of the World Cup winners. Eight of the Germany team that started the final in the Maracana were firstteam regulars for the top-three sides in the Bundesliga last season. In Roy’s current squad, only five players were regularly starting for Manchester City, Liverpool or Chelsea.

Coaches, fans and the media will have to show patience. In a club environment, fans love seeing youngsters come through the academy and cheer them on, even if they make mistakes. When England fans are thrown together from all over, they expect to see the best players in the country and many in this squad are far from the finished article. I remember England fans groaning at me with each mistake. Arsenal fans were the opposite. Gary Neville was an even more extreme example.

But the players will have to learn fast because, with a European qualifier against Switzerland a week on Monday, they may well have to be involved in something far more important than a friendly.