To be fair some of the youth teams technical ability is pretty high, I watched the under 17 Euro's this year and England were a far better team than Italy, and on par with Holland.
The issues we see now are a mixture of players not developing past 18, which is partly due to clubs refusing to give players a chance (something we ourselves are guilty of) and also a lack of developing game intelligence, which I guess links to the first point. It's all well and good being technical but if you don't know how to adjust to suit the needs of the game, its not much use. Against Sweden for example it was clear with everyone sitting back we needed to move the ball quickly and start playing quick one two's round the box, otherwise you'll never hurt the opposition defence. Only when Loftus-Cheek came on did we have a player who seemed to understand what needed to happen.
The other huge problem we see with English football is an inherent inferiority complex. Look, even if England aren't the greatest team, they're a good team. Good players. Costa Rica were a penalty shoot out from the semi-finals. You do not have to have the greatest players to do decent in tournaments. But at every level of English football, apart from for some reason the under 17's, we lost in tournament games to teams we perceive to be better than ourselves. Instead of playing the game, we try and play the opposition. Look at Southgate, he cowered away from playing the technical players like Ward-Prowse in favour of regimented, uninspired robots like Forster-Caskey and Chalobah (who were both awful).
It's a huge problem with the senior team. The team is TERRIFIED of anyone good. Pirlo was rubbish at the world cup, apart from against England who gave him all the time in the world because we gave him far too much respect. Costa Rica just swamped him and he couldn't handle it. Pretty much anytime England play a good player they do well because we just show far too much respect. The other big thing is England lack any streetwise ability at all. Knowing when to slow the game down, the dark arts South American teams excel at. Before the next tournament the team could do with a week with Pulis to teach them some of the things we so naively lack, and of course set pieces.
