Immigration, football: are they connected?

No more the vuvu's wild zanzara whine
No more the fumbled backpass into space ...

(Sorry, I've been rereading Summoned by Bells, so everything I think tends to come out as Betjemanesque blank verse ('weary and worried the supermarket queue' etc etc)).

But, I was hearing on the radio just now from a healthcare professional about the difficulty of recruiting staff from overseas with the required language and technical skillsets ...  Well, lack of language and technical skill seems to be a required qualification in the English football context, doesn't it?   It's not an exact parallel: in healthcare it's the more menial skills that are hard to import, rather than the managerial ones; and we can't import the menial workers (i.e. players), because that wouldn't be cricket, and we're not Germany. 

But again, the common whinge about England's so-called team has been 'these are world-class players in the Premier League, why can't they perform as well in the national side?'  The answer, of course, is that in the Premier League club team they're surrounded by proper world-class-plus players, who enable them to shine in their own modest way - and who all happen to be immigrants.  Outside this sheltered world, they are revealed as, not so much professional carers, more the carehome patients they are, now, about to become.

Still, the Government is about to ban (well, severely restrict) immigration of skilled labour from outside the EU, so that should do the trick for 2014.