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England: the verdict

July 2nd, 2006 · Posted by Skuds in Life · 2 Comments · Life

I don’t like to mindlessly criticise the England team or manager. I try to be logical and think that the manager must know a lot more than me and have access to all sorts of information I don’t. As for the players, how can I criticise them when I can hardly kick a ball straight and always end up injured when I play?

Having said that, they really have made it easy this time round. Granted there have been some poor decisions from refs and some bad dives from opponents, but I think that for every decision which went against us there was something else we got away with – like the Peter Crouch hair-pulling – and none of that would have mattered if we actually scored some goals.

As far as I can see, Sven and the players would have had all the credit if we had won, so its only fair for them to take all the stick now we are out, and although the players didn’t really get it together, I think a lot of that is down to Sven and his tactics.

Why did he keep changing the formation? What is the point of letting all the players get used to one way of playing through the qualifiers (or a couple of variations) and then go for something completely new which nobody understands when it really counts?

To a certain extent, choosing the formations with a lone striker stranded up-field was dictated by the players available – but the limitations there were self-imposed by the bizarre squad selection. If Jermaine Defoe had been in the squad he would have got a game – so why didn’t Sven pick him instead of someone he had no intention of playing?

For the whole of the last half-hour of the game, and all of extra time it looked like we were just hanging on for a draw so we could go for penalties. For any other team in the same situation this might have been a sensible tactic – but for a team which is historically crap at penalty shoot-outs it was just suicidal.

I know I would probably miss a penalty if the goalkeeper had his feet nailed to the ground, but then its not my job. It is Frank Lampard’s job, and Stephen Gerrard’s job, and Jamie Carragher’s job. They get paid a lot to do it, get lots of practise doing it, and still do no better than I would have done! If that sounds harsh, just remember that Portugal missed two of their penalties completely and we still lost.

We were only marginally better with our penalties than Switzerland were.

While England didn’t deserve to get any further, we also didn’t deserve to lose to Portugal. Ronaldo is more deserving of an Oscar than a winner’s medal, and more likely to get one. They failed to make use of having an extra player and then missed two penalties. They only scraped through because we are so poor at spot kicks. Against any other team, bar the Swiss, they would have been out.

Having dished out a bit of blame to the players and most of it to Sven, there is still a bit left for us and the media for having expectations which were unrealistically high. It has been said so often that we have such a strong team that we started to believe it.

If English players are so good, why is it that we get so many foreigners to play over here, and get more excited about a new foreign signing than for a new English player? Why is it that if you looked through the top leagues in Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Holland and everywhere else in the world you would only find a handful of English players? (And how many managers? Close to zero I suspect)

Its just a case of the emperor’s new clothes. I don’t deny that players tried. Beckham trying to run off an injury and play on through the pain shows great spirit, leadership and strength of character. Unfortunately football is not like a school report where you get marks for effort and attainment: only the attainment counts and we didn’t have it.

Lets get back to what works – 4-4-2 and three West Ham players in the team: Nigel Reo-Coker, Anton Ferdinand and Marlon Harewood should all be ready for the 2010 World Cup, lets get them started now.

PS. Hargreaves was good though.

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2 Comments so far ↓

  • Neil Harding

    Of course Sven should have took Defoe if he had no intention of playing Walcott (why did he not give him a run-out against Sweden?)

    But apart from that, the problem seemed to be his inability to drop the ‘star’ players. Imagine if he had had the guts to drop Beckham or Lampard and we had lost? We and the media would have crucified him. I also think the media criticism made our team play with a lot of fear (but that could be the refereeing again).

    To have 2 forwards or to have Lennon in the team, Sven had to drop a ‘big name’ player and the truth was he was too scared to do it. making Beckham captain made it difficult to drop him but I would have dropped him. Who would you have dropped?

    Yes, England should have played better, but we were still cheated. How can England be expected to play their normal game when under the new FIFA rules and the amount of diving going on, half the team would have been sent off? FIFA made sure we had no chance and that ref was a disgrace.

    Personally the world game has been ruined for me. Nobody could tell me that ref was fair. The refs have their favorite teams (which is why we got the decisions against Trinidad), and England have never got a fair ref against Scolari.

    If playing like Portugal is the way to win the World Cup then I’m glad we lost (we actually dominated the game in terms of football). The world game is a sham, it certainly has nothing to do with football anymore.

  • Bob Piper

    I think Neil makes a good point about the role of the media in all this. They hounded Sven from day one like the bunch of xenephobic bastards that they are. Thus heightening the fear, not just from Sven’s point of view, but also the players. OK, so they’re all multi-millionaires, but who wants to be publicly ridiculed across the tabloid media. Graham Taylor to this day bears the ‘turnip’ scars from the descpicable way a man who is a real gentleman was treated by these scum. Sven could have been bolder, he could have taken risks. So could Beckham, Gerrard, Lampard etc. but they played with the weight and expectation that is surely intolerable. Perhaps that would have made ‘Big Phil’ the best choice; he once decked a reporter at a press conference who was trying to nail him.