Young Manchester United star Adnan Januzaj is a talented and gifted player who will go on to do magnificent things for club and country.

But that country cannot and should not be England.

At the moment, 18-year-old Januzaj – who has yet to decide which country to represent – qualifies to play for Belgium, where he was born, and Albania, Serbia and Turkey through family lineage.

The only way he could qualify to play for England would be to live in the country for five years without representing anybody else at full international level.

And, according to Roy Hodgson and some other influential people in the English game, there is a distinct possibility they might try and make that happen. A once proud nation reduced to stealing young talent off other countries.

I can, of course, understand the temptation for England to headhunt this young starlet but that doesn’t change the fact that it would be wrong on so many levels.

For a start, what sort of message would it send out to young English players who are trying to make the grade if they not only have foreigners ahead of them at their clubs but also in the national team?

It really would be the ultimate slap in the face to the younger generation who are currently busting a gut to get chosen for the national team.

And don’t give me that nonsense that England desperately need Januzaj because it just doesn’t hold water. It would be nice to have him, of course it would. But there is a crop of English players emerging who are more than good enough.

Of course, some people will point to the fact that players like Raheem Sterling and Wilfried Zaha weren’t born in England but are very much part of the senior England squad.

And that is undeniably true. However, there is a very strong and fundamental difference between a lad who was born elsewhere but has lived in England most of his life and one who only moved to the country a few months ago.

Players like Sterling and Zaha consider England their home country because they know very little else. It’s where they were raised. For Januzaj, England is just a place he happens to work at the moment. He has no natural allegiance to it.

Jack Wilshere, a key member of that up-and-coming group I was talking about, said last week that in his opinion, foreign players shouldn’t be allowed to play for England.

“If you live in England for five years it doesn’t make you English,” he said.

And he is totally right. No more than eating pastizzi makes you Maltese or learning to dance the samba makes you Brazilian.

For Januzaj, England is just a place he happens to work at the moment

The English national team may not have much to show for its endeavours over the past 47 years or so but at least it was failure built on a solid English backbone.

And what about the time problem? Under the current naturalisation rules, Januzaj wouldn’t be eligible to play for England until 2018. Is it fair to expect him to sit out in the international wilderness for half a decade just so he can, maybe, one day, play for England?

Absolutely not.

There is one final reason why Januzaj should be left alone to represent one of the countries he is truly entitled to play for – common decency.

Don’t make the lad waste his talent on a country that ritualistically underperforms or gets knocked out of major tournaments on penalties.

It’s one thing for those people who have no other option than to play for England, but why inflict that sort of pain on a young lad unnecessarily?

With a bit of luck, Januzaj will treat these potential English advances with the contempt they deserve and go on to play for a country that really means something to him.

England getting real

Normally, when England head towards a major football tournament it is on the back of unrealistic expectations whipped up by a media frenzy of optimism.

This time, however, should Roy Hodgson’s team actually make it to Brazil (and that picture should be clearer by now), there appears to be little danger of expectations getting out of hand.

And that’s because we are now having to deal with unprecedented pessimism from the men at the top of the English game.

First FA chairman Greg Dyke wrote off the team’s chances in Brazil and said 2022 was the next realistic chance England has of winning a tournament.

Then Glenn Hoddle, one of the men on the new commission looking into ways of improving the national team, echoed his sentiments, suggesting England should use Brazil merely as a way of getting youngster some competitive experience.

Now I am all for a healthy dose of realism. Under Hodgson and with the current squad, I tend to agree that the concept of England coming home with the trophy is only for the deluded to embrace.

But do we really have to have it spelt out for us in such emphatic and depressing fashion?

Is it sensible to be writing off the country’s chances of winning a tournament before we have even qualified?

What sort of message does it send out to the players who will (hopefully) be getting on that plane next June? And what about the message it sends out to those taking part in the crucial final qualifiers?

Nobody with two brain cells to rub together expects England to do anything other than make up the numbers next summer.

But stranger things have happened. And for that reason alone I think Dyke and Hoddle might want to tone down their message of doom just a little bit.

Unless it’s all reverse psychology, of course, in which case I like their thinking and they may continue please.

Weir do we go from here?

If there were ever any doubts about the theory that good football players don’t necessarily make good managers, then David Weir has dispelled them forever.

The former Everton, Rangers and Scotland captain was put in charge of Sheffield United in the summer with the aim of evolving the club’s style of play and turning round its fortunes.

And he succeeded in doing both: by the time he was sacked last Friday he had got United playing boring, unimaginative football and taken a team that was in the play-offs last season straight to the bottom of League One.

He arrived at Bramall Lane full of talk about how he was going to get the Blades ship sailing on seas of beautiful football but ended up so far out of his depth he passed the Titanic on his way down.

Part of me feels genuinely sorry for Weir because his theories and ideas were sound. But he just lacked the ability to properly put them into practice. Not to mention the fact that the type of football he tried to play doesn’t really work in the physical minefields of the lower divisions.

He wanted United to play football like Barcelona but they ended up playing like 11 men who had just returned from a stag night in Barcelona.

And he stubbornly refused to change his approach even when one win and just five points from the first 10 games gave a pretty clear indication it wasn’t working.

Maybe Weir will get another crack at running a team. Maybe he will turn out, as a lot of people expected, to be the next David Moyes.

But in order to do that he will have to go back to basics, learn a bit more about how football management works, and be considerably more flexible with his tactics and approach in future.

He failure may have condemned United to yet another season in the wilderness of League One (possibly worse), but I bear no grudges. As a Sheffield United fan you get used to anything that can go wrong doing so.

After all, which other team could get bought out by a rich Saudi prince, spend comparatively huge amounts on new players, bring in a high-profile manager and end up 10 times worse than they were before?

It’s the Blades way.

sportscolumnist@timesofmalta.com
Twitter: @maltablade