Broken England - Reality bites for the ghosts of FA's past....the failed Lilleshall experiment

Off the conveyor belt they came. Andy Cole, Sol Campbell, Michael Owen, Joe Cole and Jermain Defoe to name a few.

Graduates from the football school of soft knocks — the FA School of Excellence at Lilleshall — which took in the cream of the country's 14-year-olds and, in their final two years of education, attempted to forge young players who could lead England to championship glory.

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It is too simplistic to suggest that since England have failed, it follows that Lilleshall failed.

After all, one of the country's foremost youth academies at West Ham considers itself successful if it can produce one player a year worthy of the first-team squad.

In total, 234 young men passed through the football greenhouse at Lilleshall in its 15-year existence.

It is eight years since it closed its doors, considered too elitist by former FA Technical Director Howard Wilkinson who believed that the concept could be copied by England's clubs.

Of the final class of 16 boys from 1999, only Tottenham's Defoe is playing in the Premier League.

"If it works for 16 talented kids, it should work for a few more," said Wilkinson.

One of the problems was that boys develop physically at different rates.

Steven Gerrard was overlooked because he was considered too frail at the time.

For Owen, however, passing the responsibility to the academies is a case of diluting the talent.

In the wake of England's failure to qualify for next summer's European Championship Finals, he said: "Lilleshall brought the cream together for specialised training and I don't see anything wrong with that.

"The club academies maybe spread the net too wide and the talented may get grouped with the less talented."

Owen would like to see a centre of excellence re-established at the FA's new national football centre at Burton, assuming the stalled £50million project ever progresses beyond the laying of a few pitches.

There are no plans for another centre of excellence there.

So what was the reality of Lilleshall and what is it like living with the tag that, at 14,you were considered one of the best 16 players in the country?

Former Manchester United defender John Curtis, captain of England at every age group up to the Under 20 side, would not trade the experience he gained in rural Shropshire.

Curtis said: "I was reluctant to go at first. I was going to finish my schooling in Manchester, but they sold the idea to me.

"I'm glad because I had a great time there. It was definitely beneficial for my football. We worked with the best coaches, the best physios. We had a ball each and did keepy-ups and pure technique work all the time.

"I'm at QPR now. They haven't got academy status and the lads there are doing running and matchplay.

"You can tell the kids who have been to a first-class academy and those who haven't. They learn at a different rate.

"At United , it wasn't as technique-based as Lilleshall, but we still did an awful lot of that work.

"Lilleshall was a great idea but you can't pick a professional footballer when he's 14 or 15.

"The FA found that out with a costly experiment at Lilleshall."

It would be equally simplistic to say that Curtis's career, having had the head start that Lilleshall was supposed to give him and his contemporaries, has gone downhill since he left United for Blackburn at the age of 21.

Consider the United FA Youth Cup-winning team of which he was a part in 1995 and only Phil Neville is playing in the top flight.

And while his situation of not being wanted by QPR's new Italian manager Luigi De Canio has Curtis, still just 29, looking forward to the transfer window in January, he is still enjoying a more fruitful career than most of his Lilleshall classmates.

Of them, only Neil Clement and Jody Morris have made any impact.

Curtis said: "Probably only four or five of my year are still playing.

"Lilleshall basically turned you into a professional footballer at 14 because of the intensity of the training.

"Physiologically I don't think that's a good thing. As a footballer you have a finite resource of your fitness. If you start later, you tend to last longer."