I was listening to Five Live's programme yesterday about the preparations for Beijing olympics and they had Peter Keen on the show who is the Head of Performance at UK Sport (he is the guy credited with initiating the great renaissance in British cycling they recently won 9 gold medals at Manchester Track World Championships). He was describing how they have installed a winning mentality into the sport by being ruthless with team selections only accepting people who want to win and be the best of the best. What has this got to do with football I hear you ask, well on a day when Brian Barwick annouces that the FA have set Fabio Capello the target of reaching the semi-finals of the 2010 World Cup or Euro 2012, Peter Keen told Five Live listeners that there are no plans in place to get an England's Women football team to win the gold medal at the final of the 2012 London Olympics.

     What type of message does that send out to the world? It says we are happy to almost succeed nationality in the men’s game, I wish the FA had told Capello that we have to win both competitions! But we don't care enough to put some future plans together to give the England women’s football team every chance to reach the Olympic final being held in our country playing our national sport with the final being held at Wembley!

              I can imagine the FA are trying to ignore the problem (or more likely sort out the men’s team) and put the responsibility back on to Hope Powell who has already done so much for Women’s. They should be listening to her and giving her what she thinks she needs to put together a winning Olympic Women’s football team for 2012 even if that is more funding, in fact they should be begging her to take the job on. Her success can’t be ignore she has already took our women to the 2007 World Cup (where they lost against the USA in the quarter finals) and they are currently leading their group for the women’s Euro 09 competition.

Currently the support from the FA is at an all time high for women’s football with currently £4.5m going into the game. However that money goes into financing the grass roots as well as money going into each county to get more girls playing in schools and 20 full time scholarships so it will help the 2012 bid but we need more.

I am aware the men's team is having its own problems but with all the money in Premiership and all that extra advertising revenue you can imagine the money men coming up with a solution to get a men's team out probably just composing of English player’s. Sepp Blatter originally maintained a British Olympic team would not threaten the independent status of any of the home nations associations but he has since England should enter a team composed of players only from England. With Olympic qualification impossible as its based on Fifa’s under-21 competitions in which the four nations compete individually England can qualify as a host nation.

       To have no plans in place however it appears again that the FA is happy to allow an England football team to lose to Germany again! Personally I couldn’t bear to see Germany or any other nation, win Olympic gold at Wembley. What is so sad is that we have a chance to do something about it and more importantly time to prepare properly for such an occasion. We are already years behind countries like Germany, USA and Sweden were the women’s game is more developed. This is partly because of their international teams success on the international stage. So to deny our women that same type of opportunity when the Olympics are being held in our country should shame every English loving football fan.