[spireitematt]

I'm not really talking about the idiot B team model we have Checkatraded in, I'm talking about a Manchester City operating a club which runs separately from Manchester City. They wouldn't even have to be young players, but they would be idiotic if they did not seize the opportunity to blood lots of their young pros. Who would you rather see, a journeyman pro' at Newport County, or the boy Man City think might be the new Messi? And surely it's better to see him happily turning out for the club he's chosen than as a loanee at Peterborough where he might hate the place, the people and be playing like a dick?

You are responsible for the French hat-trick at Peterborough Matt not me, you wanted the EEC and free movement of labour n'est ce pas? And anyway who is to say how much playing with the French kid helps all Norwich's young English and Scottish kids? He might be raising their game. Look at the impact Ricky German has on our young players, and he's not even German.

When you talk to fans of clubs in the top divisions a lot of them haven't a clue about who is where lower down the pyramid. The BBC website even quite regularly assigns stories to the wrong division. A couple of seasons ago I was telling our local Newcastle fan that Milton Keynes Dons had a player who would soon be the best in the country. He'd not really heard of him & didn't even know MKD were challenging for a place in the Championship (he did quickly however find out we signed Ched Evans! That kinda news travels!) The impression beyond the bubble of League One and Two clubs is that we're pretty boring and no one much cares. I'm trying to step outside our bubble and take a realistic look in. I've always liked Bury, they gave us Victoria Wood and Elbow, but we're forever playing each other and shuttling up and down the same divisions.

If it looks exciting young fans and players will want to know. They'll see US as a pathway to success. They'll want to sign. Who wouldn't like to play like Dele Alli? 46 games and a couple of bouts of steak-and-kidney-pie food poisoning, well it's grandad, it's whippets, it's a half o' John Smiths. It's stale!

Under the present system if Chesterfield gets itself a good team it might be unlucky enough to do it whilst stranded in Division 2, so we've then got to get promotion in a long hard season, keep that side together, not be tempted to sell our star player, keep the spirit and also improve it a bit and if we are really lucky we might achieve the miracle, not achieved for over 50 years, of the decent level of football called the Championship. Under my proposal to get to the Championship a team like ours would have to be better than just 15 other teams, okay one or two of them would be pretty good, but we wouldn't have to ride the ups and downs of "oh he's only a division two player". We'd improve our standards, because we'd have to. We'd know how good we needed to be.

AND we'd only be fifteen teams from the Championship. It's like only being 24 Hours From Tulsa. Gene Pitney, Matt. Right, who? He's dead.

Love you all dearly. Above all you have the right to be wrong. But if beating 15 other teams to reach The Championship isn't a good idea, advantageous to a club like ours, I'll eat Paddy Ashdown's hat.

That idea you have mentioned has been talked about before about Premier League clubs buying a L1/L2 club and then loaning players out to them.

To get our National team competing with the likes of Germany and Spain etc the FA, Premier League and the Government need to invest money into grassroots and facilities, they also need to make UEFA A & B Licenses cheaper like they are in Spain and Germany as we don't have enough coaches in England. Also the way we play in England needs to be looked at as well, we focus too much on fitness where Italy, Spain and Germany focus on ball control and retaining possession.

When we see England play at a tournament or a friendly what do they do? They run out flat for 90 minutes, play long balls and get outplayed and we see it time and time again. Also look at the selection process there were times when all you needed to do was play for Manchester United and you were automatically selected and because a player had 1 good game for West Ham or Southampton the press stop clambering for him to be picked to play for England. Look at the England cricket team that team is pretty much the same starting eleven as always with maybe 1 or 2 changes and it works because they play together all the time so they build up confidence, morale and a rapport.

We won the World Cup in 66 nearly came close in 90 and came close to winning the Euro's in 96 and they said that when the Premier League was set up that it would help the National team and its gone the other way. Changing the structures of the leagues won't help the National team as that has to start right at the bottom at grassroots level.