As English footballers flop again, should we really be surprised?

AS the latest obituaries about the England Under-21s are written, one question stands out.

Is anyone really surprised?

For the third successive time in this competition, the Young Lions have gone out at the group stages of the European Championships, winning just one of nine matches in that time.

To their credit, England are the only country to have qualified for the eight-team Finals on the last three occasions, but something is going very wrong when the pressure is on.

Yet how can you expect to prosper without your best players?

Imagine Chelsea or Manchester City having to take on Real Madrid or Barcelona in the Champions League missing half-a-dozen of their star players. Their chances would be reduced straight away.

We always hear about sport at the highest level being decided by the finest margins. So, of course, there is a problem when you tilt the scales against you from the start.

And so it was for England again in the Czech Republic over the last fortnight. And in Israel two years ago, when senior manager Roy Hodgson had prioritised a friendly in Brazil over the Under-21 Championships.

Phil Jones, Jack Wilshere, Raheem Sterling, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Ross Barkley and Luke Shaw were all eligible for this year’s Finals, but the policy was to overlook them.

The theory put forward by Under-21 boss Gareth Southgate is that apart from Shaw, none of them had contributed to qualifying and were not ‘Under-21 players’.

Plus, they didn’t want to jeopardise the team spirit that had been created by the other players during the qualifying games.

But that is part and parcel of football. Promoted clubs have to bring in players to improve their teams and stay up. Top clubs bring in star names on bigger salaries to try to win the League.

All six were at the World Cup last summer and will expect to be at the Euros in France next year.

Yet none of them can call upon positive tournament experience, having been knocked out in Brazil after two matches.

They cannot recall a difficult moment when the pressure was on and they found a way through.

Take Barkley, for example. The Everton midfielder has 13 senior caps to his name, but has only started two of those games.

Yet we have been constantly told how good this player can be, and the Under-21 Championships would have been the ideal chance to prove it.

This would have been the time for Barkley to stand up and take responsibility for his side in a pivotal position, just as he will have to do, eventually, for his club or the senior England team.

Instead, Hodgson only gave him a few minutes from the bench in the goalless draw away to the Republic of Ireland and didn’t call upon him for the qualifier in Slovenia.

He will know today what he already knew a few weeks ago, so nothing has been learned.

Oxlade-Chamberlain wasn’t even considered by Hodgson for the two June fixtures and he didn’t play a single minute at the World Cup.

Yet nor was he considered for selection by Southgate. Here is a player who should have relished the chance to show Hodgson and Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger that he should be pushing for a regular start for both sides.

Instead, he has taken to Twitter to post pictures from where he has been spending his holidays.

Too often, these players get a taste of senior international football and the drawbridge is raised.

Club managers and agents are too quick to tell these youngsters that they are now too good for age-group football and so a stigma is created.

But a huge opportunity is being missed.

When the European Championships come round next year, much will be made of how England will have to adapt to tournament football to succeed.

The change of the Under-21 Euros to odd years should have allowed the best youngsters excellent practice.

There are three high-pressure games in a short space of time, subject to media scrutiny and done while living in the pockets of your team-mates. But we don’t seem to have grasped the nettle.

Ben Gibson, Liam Moore and Nathaniel Chalobah might not even make it in the Premier League.

The likelihood is they’ll never play at a major Finals, but they were mainstays for Southgate in the Czech Republic.

In 2009, the Under-21s reached the Final of this Championship, where they were thrashed 4-0 by Germany.

That German squad contained six players who won the World Cup last summer, as well as two others who represented other countries in Brazil.

In contrast, only three regulars have emerged for England Joe Hart, James Milner and Theo Walcott, and a good number of that 2009 squad now operate in the lower leagues.

This suggests that despite the positive talk from the FA, the Under-21s still do not operate as a fluid pathway to the senior team.

History backs this up. It is now 31 years since the Under-21s were European Champions and of the 17 players involved in the two-legged Final against Spain, only four of them went to a major tournament.

The big difference was that the class of 1984 were all regulars with their clubs in the old First Division. They were used to playing matches.

The clamour for Wilshere and Sterling would not be so strong if there was a huge pool of English talent in the Premier League.

It means the best young players are fast-tracked into the senior squad ahead of schedule and the Under-21s are forced to look to the Championship.

Harry Kane was the sensation of the season as he burst through at Tottenham because we had forgotten how exciting it was.

But the emergence of that type of player needs to become the norm, and not the exception, if England teams are going to prosper in the near future.