Jack Wilshere clarifies England views

England midfielder Jack Wilshere has attempted to diffuse an escalating row over his view of eligibility for the national side.

Wilshere sent out a series of tweets on Wednesday evening aimed at clarifying his position over a delicate issue, which he initially waded into during a press conference ahead of England's World Cup qualifier with Montenegro on Friday.

"To be clear, never said 'born in England' - I said English people should play for England," said Wilshere.

I am amazed at how Wilshere’s comments have sparked such reaction, particularly as he was just speaking his mind, and to be honest I agree with most of what he said.

Obviously if you look at English/British sports teams many of them contain individuals who were born in other parts of the world and have obtained citizenship here and represent us, successfully in a lot of cases, but Wilshere was right to highlight the point about how moving to a different country and living there for five years all of a sudden makes you eligible to represent that country.

He was right to say if he went and lived in Spain for five years that doesn’t make him Spanish, there needs to be a closer look at the eligibility rules because in football you can have a situation where a player can play youth football and even friendlies for one country and then gain citizenship and play for another.

I don’t care what side of the argument you’re on stuff like that shouldn’t be allowed to happen, you can’t have players representing one country through the youth ranks and even in friendlies and then suddenly they decide oh actually I’d rather play for another country I technically qualify for.  

At the moment in La Liga Atletico Madrid’s Diego Costa is the perfect example of this, he was born in Brazil and even made two appearances for the Brazilian team in March this year, but because he’s lived in Spain since 2007 he applied for Spanish citizenship and has now chosen to represent Spain and will more than likely play for Spain at the World Cup in Brazil in the summer.

I think the eligibility rules should be tweaked to stop things like this from happening so you don’t have a situation where a player represents two different countries, in fact if the paperwork had gone through on time Costa would have been called up for Spain for their qualifying games against Belarus and Georgia, so he would have played for two different countries in the same year.  

This issue is even more significant when you consider that only 31.8% of the minutes played in the Premier League have been by English players, compared to 50% in Germany and 59% in Spain, with less and less players on show and a smaller and smaller pool of talent to choose from it’s no wonder we’re looking to grab anyone we can to play for us.

But instead the focus should be on what can be done to develop more home-grown talent and increase the percentage of English players playing in the Premier League, maybe if that was focused on there wouldn’t be this hullabaloo about what qualifies you to play for England and who should and shouldn’t.