Not sure if Im taking your comment out of context here (i assume you are talking about Messi) but arent the bold points precicely the problem? Is it ridiculous to suggest that at the age of 9 or 10 lennon, milner, downing, Beckham, even Ronney (!) had the potential to become messi's but were trained to 'get to the byline then cross to the target man' ? The fact that our natural talent is being trained to play a certain way, a way which patently doesnt work in the big games, is surely the root of the problem, meaning the choice of manager is largely neither here nor there until that problem is fixed?