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Martin Samuel has a riveting piece in today's Times on the underlying cause of the uselessness of the England football team:This morning I would like to challenge Sir Trevor Brooking, and everybody involved in the organisation of youth football in this country, to a game. One condition: new rules.
The goal will be 3.057 metres high, which equates to more than 10ft, roughly one and two thirds the size of Paul Robinson, making it physically impossible to touch the bar from a standing jump. (When the Australian security forces erected a fence to protect the world leaders attending the APEC conference in Sydney this year, it was three metres high.)
The goalline will be 9.174 metres long (about 30ft) or almost five Scott Carsons laying head to toe. A goalkeeper standing in the middle would have to dive almost five metres to get his body behind the ball and adequately protect inside his posts; the present width of the whole goal is 7.32 metres.
The length of the pitch will be 150.4 metres (165 yards), placing the halfway line at 75 metres. Using these dimensions, for a goalkeeper to get the ball out of his half from a grounded goal kick, he would have to clear, without bouncing, to the midway point of the opposition half with pitch measurements as they are now. The edge of the penalty area will be extended to 20.68 metres (23 yards), almost a third again on the present space, and the width of the pitch will be 112.80 metres (124 yards), which is a greater expanse than the length of most present pitches. Everything else will be the same, including the number of players and the duration of the match.
And when this travesty of a game is finished, when everybody is exhausted and fed up and utterly frustrated with demands that are at odds with the strength of the human body and the fundamental skill-based nature of the sport, then, and only then, will we comprehend what it is like to play football as a ten-year-old in England.