FA can learn from foreign Olympic coaches

Czech Jan Bartu was taken on as modern pentathlon's performance director and helped Stephanie Cook win gold and Kate Allenby bronze.

Then in addition to the gold won by Redgrave and the coxless four crew of Matthew Pinsent, Tim Foster and James Cracknell, Grobler played his part in the gold medal won by the men's eight and the silver won by the women's quadruple sculls.

After failing to win a single judo medal in Atlanta in 1996, Britain appointed German Olympic Champion Udo Quellmalz as performance director. It wasn't the most dramatic turnaround but Kate Howey still managed to stop the rot by winning silver in the women's' 70 kilogram division.

And although cycling's performance director Peter Keen (a Briton) has been credited with the remarkable medal haul in Sydney which included gold for Jason Queally in the one kilometre time trial, a silver for the Olympic sprint team and bronzes for Yvonne McGregor and the 4,000 metre team pursuit squad, a number of foreign technical coaches from France and Australia played their part.

Not every foreign appointment worked. In hockey, Australian Chris Spice was unable to help Britain's men and women qualify for the latter stages of the Olympic tournament. While in triathlon, Frenchman Greg Millet could not steer hot favourite Simon Lessing (himself a South African by birth) to the gold everyone expected him to win. British gymnasts were aided by four Bulgarians, five Russians, three Romanians and a Hungarian but they too failed to make up ground on the rest of the world.

But with Britain winning 11 gold medals - their best haul since the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp - the general opinion at the British Olympic Association is that their foreign policy worked.

BOA Chief executive Simon Clegg said: "The best man for the job should be selected for the job irrespective of their nationality. With the advent of lottery funding, the governing bodies of Olympic sports were able to professionalise their coaching structures.

"In some cases that meant appointing the outstanding British coaches full time while in others it allowed sports to cast the net further afield. You only have to look at what happened in Sydney to see how successful that was.

"In an ideal world you would want all the best coaches in the world to be British and it is our long term plan to nurture and develop coaching talent at home. But it's not an ideal world and until then, sports will have to keep looking abroad."

Whether the BOA's theory could successfully be applied to the parochial world of English football is another matter. At a time when the notion of Britishness is being re-examined, the dilemma facing the national game encapsulates the barriers talked about in the Runnymede Trust's report.

Opposition from little Englanders who back the re-appointment of Terry Venables and dismiss the possible appointment of Arsene Wenger, Aime Jacquet or Sven Goran Eriksson (fanciful though they all are) as an affront to the national dignity are missing the point.

Appointing a foreigner, they say, would be an admission that we are not good enough. But we've known that for a long time and with Zimbabwean Duncan Fletcher in charge of the England cricket team and New Zealander Graham Henry in charge of the British Lions rugby side, the calls for English football to follow suit are becoming ever stronger.

Clegg agrees with them. He said: "We already see a number of football managers from overseas working with clubs and I don't believe the Football Association should close down the avenue of looking outside the UK.

"If there are better people to be considered who are not from a British background, then they should be considered."

The real question remains unanswered, however. If the FA do eventually decide to consider a foreign coach, would he even want the job?