It's strange, I've watched quite a bit of the u21 England side over the years when there are Spurs players appearing like Caulker, Rose, Adam Smith and now with Kane and Carroll and the sides are almost always quite good to watch. This current side is brilliant. Kane and Carroll are both great technical footballers add in the likes of Berahino, Will Hughes, Nathan Redmond, and a few other and they really play some nice creative football. Something just happens between the youth levels and the senior teams where it all seems to go to shit.
For me, the ultimate thing that encapsulates the problems with English football is that Michael Carrick and Paul Scholes don't even have 100 caps between them. Those two were at the center of the some of the best sides we saw in EPL history. Xavi idolizes Scholes, call him the best deep lying playmaker of his lifetime if that doesn't show how good he I don't know what does. Yet, there is Scholes playing left midfield for England to allow Gerrard and Lampard in the middle. In another country, Scholes and Carrick would have been immovable national team stalwarts like Pirlo, Schweinsteiger, Xavi, or Busquets. Instead Gerrard and Lampard more than doubled them in caps, and no English manager ever realized that the reason why those two were so good is because they had players like Scholes and Carrick playing behind them. Lampard had Makelele, Gerrard had Alonso. England just never appreciates the players whose subtly massively influences the game. They prefer to go for the star names. Modric would have never made it into an England side had he grown up here.