England’s Adam Smith (left) and Norway’s Marcus Pedersen fight for the ball during their Euro U-21 Championship Group A match on Saturday.

Former England manager Graham Taylor believes the senior national team will not succeed at tournaments unless its young stars are allowed to shine at Under-21 level.

Stuart Pearce’s Young Lions will not progress to the semi-finals of this year’s European Championship after suffering defeats to Italy and Norway in their opening group games, meaning tomorrow’s meeting with hosts Israel is a dead rubber.

Four of the players who helped seal qualification for the tournament – Phil Jones, Danny Welbeck, Jack Wilshere and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain – were instead chosen by Roy Hodgson to represent the senior England side in friendly games against Ireland and Brazil.

And Taylor, who managed the Three Lions between 1990 and 1993, feels England’s failure to reach the semi-finals of a tournament since 1996 is due to the lack of experience at junior level among such highly-rated talents.

He told BBC 5 Live’s Sportsweek programme: “It means we will never have players coming into the senior side who’ve experienced winning a tournament.

“We say we have the England Under-21s there but we don’t have the best Under-21s there who are playing at the time.

“The chances of winning the tournament were not all that great, but I’m talking about how it’s very difficult for players to get experience of a tournament at Under-21 age when they’re being held out for the senior side.

“People might say the senior side is more important, but we need players who have experienced tournament football.

“That’s where England have not produced over the years when they come to play in tournaments.”

Foreigners’ influx

Taylor also pinpointed statistics from the recently concluded Premier League season that suggest young English players, and their more experienced colleagues, are being given less of a platform to shine than their foreign team-mates.

Champions Manchester United used 25 players in the league, 10 of whom were English, while Arsenal and Manchester City deployed five and seven Englishmen from their respective 25-man squads.

“We’ve all seen this coming,” Taylor said.

“Change was needed when the Premier League was formed in the early 1990s and you could say that the Premier League has been one of the major commercial successes of Europe. It’s a fantastic league but it has been at the expense of English players.

“We get the tremendous amount of money that has now come into football and it means the top four or five clubs are looking for the best players, not in England, but in the world.

“I think it’s something that shouldn’t surprise us but it doesn’t make selection for the national side easy at all, especially when you have the run of injuries that Roy’s had.”

Retired defender Sol Campbell, who earned 73 caps in 11 years with England, feels certain young stars have approached tournaments with an unhealthy sense of entitlement before they have achieved anything in the game.

He told Sky Sports News: “I think the Under-21s, and with football in general in England, the quality has gone down.

“Yes, there are some really good players coming up but, on the whole, they think they’re there already.

“There are a lot of other countries around the world with very good players on top of their game, but continue to work hard, not believing they have made it already.

“They might be playing for the first teams already, but they don’t lose it.

“They don’t think they’ve made it already.

“You keep on learning, you’ve got to keep on striving and that is what I feel has gone from English football.”

Group B
Holland vs Russia - 5-1
Germany vs Spain - 0-1

(Holland, Spain through to semi-finals)