"He loves a foreigner, that Wenger"

The BBC says: "Despite the Premier League being hailed the world's leading domestic competition, that success has yet to be transformed into an improved England national team. Critics have pointed to the high number of overseas players, denying home-grown talent a chance to play."

Perhaps I'm being more Jade Goody (thick, not dead) than Stephen Hawking about this, but I honestly don't understand the link. Is the premise that reducing the number of good foreign players so less-good English ones can play will make the English ones better? How does that make sense? Surely it will just result in a false sense of ability, so England rock up at a tournament thinking they're good because they've only been exposed to each other - only to find they're crap compared with the rest (a bit like the recent World Cup, but on a bigger scale).

This brings me on to the new - and mental - Premier League squad rule. In short: maximum squad of 25 players; seven or more must be 'home grown'. The aim is to reduce the size of the rich clubs' squads and to give the English players a chance to play. Except that's badly thought out too. Take Jack Wilshere, for example. He will stay at Arsenal so Wenger can include him in his 'home grown' contingent. But he won't play nearly as much as he would out on loan at, say, Bolton. So that's backfired.

The real issue to be tackled is how English kids are developed. The best players will always rise to the top, wherever they come from. The fact that not enough English ones are rising to the top is because development in this country is not good enough. It's because clubs pick up big, strong, powerful kids and, when they reach 16, realise they can't play football and so release them to a life of working at Morrison's because they gave up on school thinking they were "gonna make it".

Wenger also gets a lot of stick for not signing English players. And it's true he's only signed six Englishmen in 14 years. That's partly because the English equivalent of a £10m defender will probably cost £25m to buy and Wenger is astute. But it's also because when he's had English players, he's had his fingers burned: Bentley (over-rated, under-talented, has to walk everywhere), Jeffers (more pox than fox, released by Ipswich), Richard Wright (couldn't catch), Theo Walcott (doesn't have a trick), Jermaine Pennant (over-rated and a wanker), Matthew Upson (no pace, can't turn, found his level at West Ham), Sol Campbell (obviously a success but went home at half time because we were losing, hence mentally unstable), Justin Hoyte (Middlesboro).

The point is that it's easy to blame the lack of English talent on foreign players or, quite simply, Arsene Wenger not playing or buying English players. However, 42% of the players who played in the Premier League last years were eligible for England. But were 42% of the best players in the Premier League English? No. That's because simply giving them a game doesn't make them the best. They have to be good enough in the first place.