Euro 2020 - Live Match Discussion And General Chat

We need a Gazza. A mercurial talent who can influence a game on his own.

Kane is the dullest 'world class' player I've seen. Decent target man, dribbles and draws a few fouls and can poach goals, but outside of the 6 yard box he offers nothing to fear. Sterling has the wherewithal to scare a defence, but more often than not he's on his own once he breaks into the box.

Pickford is shyte. Fair play for saving the two penalties, but he is not a tournament winning goalie. Both our centre backs are a bit mediocre too.

Philips was my motm yesterday, closely followed by the two wing backs.

Overall, despite their posession, it took a shid the bed moment from their corner to get them back into the game.

We have a team capable of getting to a final. It really was as little as Rashford and Sancho putting their laces through the ball and we'd have won. That's all the difference was in the end.

Make no mistake, we will go to Qatar as a team to be feared, unlike previous tournament when English hopes were purely an invention of the English media and fans. For once, we are playing the right sort of football to progress. It could be tweaked slightly to take a few more chances and be a bit more positive on occasion, but I hardly think we're far away from being the best we've been since 66.

 

All the pain of this loss will go away on Saturday when we lose to Colchester in our first pre-season game. England will be forgotten, and it will be met with the masses stating that we are getting relegated because we lost a pre-season game. Can’t wait!

 

"Their brave brave exit" - is that called a "brbrexit"?

 

I see what you mean but the setup under Southgate will prevent any Gascoigne style playmaker being involved. I too thought that Rice and Phillips were great yesterday, but in that breakup play, stop the opposition way. Sitting deep with two cautious holding midfielders and you're not going to have the opportunity for a player to be the Jorginho or Verratti and buzz around the opposition box and set the tempo.

And Grealish was found out as a bit of a no-trick pony in the tournament in the end. Wins a few free kicks, might get the decent cross in, but the defence splitting, match-winning talent he was hyped up to be he certainly wasn't.

Foden the same. Surround him with technically brilliant world class players under a supercoach like Pep and he looks amazing.

And with Mount and Kane virtually anonymous, maybe it was a huge achievement to make it to penalties with 9 men.

 

We'll be relegated whether we lose or win 6-0.

 

Just had a chat with a guy who works a couple of doors down, English-Italian and his son managed to get them tickets for the Italy end. Said they were gobbed on twice and one of their party had a drink thrown at him walking down Wembley way. Said they went back to their car and put jackets on to hide their shirts.

 

Yeah, I Feel like Grealish was benefiting from the Will Hoskins effect, as with every minute of his absence, the hype and expectation over his talent grew.

He's a good player, but he's also a bit of a wildcard and not really good enough at what he does to mitigate the risk of playing him for 90 minutes game after game.

I know we were negative and boring to watch, but it's only for 7 games every 2 years. I can put up with that if it means we get to finals and semis. People bemoaning our 'easy run' are forgetting how often an easy tournament has sunk us at 1/4 and earlier. We are living up to our hype as a semis as a minimum side now - the risk averse football is the reason.

I don't think this side has the talent of the era of Beckham, Scholes, Lampard and Gerard, but we already have seen much more from them in just two tournaments.

I think it's churlish of people to write that unarguable step up in performance off and ignore that this is the best we've been since olden days.

 

That’s not the result of the coach saying ‘don’t try’. It’s what happens when you give away possession cheaply and have to fall back to chase it. Then no one is up the pitch and options close.

Southgate attempted with Saka and Grealish to change that, but it didn’t change our lack of possession until extra time. By which time the Italians were both on top and more cautious.

It baffles me that fans look at the game and think the obvious isn’t also obvious to the coaching team. Of course we were poor in the second half, but simply saying get upfield wouldn’t change that. We had to win and keep the ball. We couldn’t.

Southgate’s somewhat ponderous possession football has actually been an attempt to address England’s previous woeful technique against better opposition. At the final hurdle only did this fail.

 

That post saddens me a great deal.

Watford also have suck w***ers amongst their support.

 

Yes. I'm so excited to return to discussing whether some bloke from the Belgian league who we won't actually sign plays predominantly on the left or the right. Or debating whether signing a 32 year old defender on a free is a bit sh*t or very sh*t.

 

I think the reality is, however you lose you’ll always wish you lost a different way. I told myself anything short of a hiding and I wouldn’t be disappointed, now we’ve lost to such fine and avoidable margins I think I would actually prefer the hiding.

 

If you take Tripper off for Sako you have effectively changed formation. Secondly, letting them have the ball and playing on the break as I believe they intended to do second half worked before in other games just didn't work as well this time because England were less effective in the 2nd half with the counter attack. The players just didn't execute, they were a bit off. Thirdly, Italy are a good side, I can't believe anybody was going to think they were not going to be dangerous at some points in the game.

 

The Will Hoskins Effect is one of a number of similarly related syndromes such as the Okaka Syndrome or the Ibarbo Complex. Such syndromes usually appear under the umbrella of Berghuis Theory.

 

Agreed. It's just so frustrating getting an early goal then slamming the breaks on.

This wasn't like pulling a hottie on a night out and trying to think of Maggie Thatcher so you don't spill your nuts too quickly. This should've been a quick doinky donk behind the kebab house with an Italian waitress. Game over and one for the memories.

I think I'm hungover still.

 

Just reading a bit more about the Pens. Apparently it was predetermined by a league table in training going back three years. The 5 were set based on that and then the rest sorted out at the final whistle. Grealish said he offered to take a penalty and has even tweeted sky as much, yet the order after Saka is said to be Pickford then Phillips, so either Grealish is lying or Southgate has totally lost the plot having a keeper and a DM who has probably never taken a penalty ahead of him.

Also if the five were set beforehand, why on Earth put a teenager as the fifth taker, the penalty that probability wise will more often than not be the highest pressure kick.

Total madness all round.

 

Great stats. So we've not beaten a top 10 ranked team in a major competion for how long ?
We are football's equivalent to Tim Henman.
Can put second tier teams away after a bit of a battle, but are beaten as soon as we hit a top 10 side in the knockout stages. Fortunately for Gareth, our easy routes through the last 2 major competitions have delayed us meeting a top 10 side until the SF & F respectively.

 

A familiar feeling of disappointment and emptiness. The mistake was holding out for penalties against Donarumma, he's won all 5 of his shootouts and has a 2 in 3 penalty save rate. We should have gone at them in the last 15 minutes. More likely to win that way than on penalties.

Reaching our first ever European final has to be considered an achievement and clearly the players are technically better and better at keeping possession than in the past but as the game wore on we reverted to type and couldnt get on the ball or keep possession.

Despite all the hype we clearly don't have any world class players. Kane was 0 threat and has now failed to have an impact in a WC semi final, CL final and EC final as well as losing 2 league cup finals a nations league semi among others and being part of a team that bottled 2 premier league title run ins. He's 27 and has never won a trophy. He's a great role model but he's not a leader and he's clearly not world class.

In 66 we had 3 of the best players in the world in the team (Banks, Moore and Charlton) how many genuinely world class players have we had since? Gazza is the best player I've seen in an England shirt but he was a complete trainwreck of a man and only ever scored 1 tournament goal. Think about that, a national footballing hero who only scored 1 tournament goal!!!!! We are so tinpot!

Since 66 we've seen world class players like G Muller Matthaus Ronaldo Ronaldinho Romario Zico Revellino Roberto Carlos Messi Maradona C Ronaldo Figo Van Bastan Gullit Cruyff Zidane Desailly Platini Kante Xavi Iniesta Baresi Buffon Maldini Totti Chilieni Hagi Laudrup and Modric. It's difficult to claim any English player in the last 50 years has been consistently close to this level.

Without world class players we are reliant on team building and we are still progressing. This squad has 3 tournaments left in it. My only unfulfilled dream left in life is to see England win the world cup. Despite our latest set back I still feel we are closer to building a team capable of that than any time since 1970.

Southgate started with 7 of the players who lost the WC semi final. The 4 new players were Shaw Mount Rice and Phillips. All upgrades but still not enough ability/nous/in game intelligence to counteract the Italian midfield. Theres still hope some of our younger players, possibly Bellingham will have what it takes to boss a game against a big team in a tournament but I don't recommend holding our breath.

 

Rashford made a meal of his penalty

 

In Qatar Bellingham or Foden could be that man. They are both still really young. I'd expect Foden to play central midfield for club and country when he's ready.

 

Denmark are ranked 10th. https://www.fifa.com/fifa-world-ranking/men?dateId=id13295

 

He should stop dabbling in football and stick to what he's good at: feeding millions of undernourished children.

 

I thought he was auditioning for the next come dancing to be honest

Ridiculous penalty

 

I don’t really have a problem with the run up because it actually worked and sent the keeper the wrong way, not managing to hit that vast yawning chasm 12 yards in front of him was the issue.

 

You are Natalie Elphicke and I claim my £5.

 

Do you not think the world contributes to it? An inordinate number of accounts on Twitter that tweet that bile are either 'FirstName490432687' type accounts (almost certainly bots under the control of god knows who) or users who appear to be based abroad. For every racist estate agent there are, I suspect, 50 made up accounts posting that stuff. It's the inability of the social media companies to get a grip on it that is the bigger issue.

 

Good spot.

But beating an Eriksen-less 10th placed Denmark side in extra time doesn’t really detract away from my point, that we’ve been outrageously lucky with fixtures and lost against every high quality side we’ve faced.

If we lost to Italy in the round of 16 on penalties, we’d have labelled it a miserable tournament, even if they eventually went on to win it.

 

I think u misread my post!

 

It seems the draw is by far the biggest factor in our tournament progress. Since 1966 the only teams we've got past in the knock out stages of the world cup or euros are: Paraguay, a weak Belgium, Cameroon, a weak Spain, Denmark twice, Ecuador, Sweden, Colombia, a weak Germany and Ukraine. We haven't beaten a top team in a knockout game since 1966. Our knockout wins against Spain, Belgium and Germany were all achieved when they had relatively weak teams.

We view ourselves as a big football nation but thats only true for our club teams. 10 countries have won the euros, we are not one of them. As a footballing nation we have more in common with countries like Portugal Mexico Turkey and Holland than the big guns of Brazil Argentina Germany Italy Spain and France. In fact we are the opposite of France who have 2 world cups and 2 euros but only one Champions league. French clubs have lost 14 of their 16 European finals. Conversely our clubs have won 31 major European trophies. However, we've just got our 1 world cup compared to Italy and Germany's 7 major trophies.

 

I'm not sure I agree - and I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the rankings either. Beating Germany and Croatia - two national sides with a lot of competition pedigree - is not to be sniffed at. I don't think we've been "outrageously lucky" with fixtures either. Of the sides in the semi-finals, Italy were the only side with a harder route there than us. Generally, to get to a tournament final, at least one of them two teams only has to beat one half-decent team, and you might do that via penalties. Look at Croatia in 2018, they won two shoot-outs against Denmark and Russia and then beat us.

 

A real dog's breakfast.

 

It will happen. Have faith.
PS You're not older than 15 are you ? Ah well.....

 

I feel pride in the team because they stand for everything the Raging gammons are not