The English: sports mad or just daft losers?

I have a hundred sports books on my shelves, but none that properly examines England's flawed sporting culture. None that tackles the biggest subject on the landscape: how we invest so much of ourselves, our time and our money but still underachieve. We are not talking about the trophy count only, but the wider flaws, such as how an Italian comes to run our national football team, why Laura Robson has to be mentored by a Dutchman, why our best cricketer is South African, why only 34 per cent of starting players in the Barclays Premier League are English, why Andy Murray felt it necessary to spend his formative tennis years at an academy in Barcelona, why our National Football Centre has yet to open its doors to a single footballer after seven years (yes, seven years) of wrangling, and if one hour a week of PE in primary... [read full story]