The same old stuff about lack of committment, lack of desire and lack of pride in the shirt gets spouted out by football fans in this country pretty much all the time and to be honest I just don't buy it.
To me England lost two matches in this World Cup due to poor game management on the pitch and poor defending.
They enabled themselves to be exposed quite needlessly through a lack of clarity of purpose and lapses in concentration. The most significant example of this was once England had worked so hard to get back in the match against Uruguay. It looked to me like England were not collectively unified in a desire to stick or twist.
The winning goal summed it up for me.
Three England defenders in a diagonal zig zag line in their own box.
One saying push out, one saying drop deep and the other between the two stools.
Suarez took advantage even though he was offside.
Physically it seemed to me that the players tried their best and that they cared.
And for me England's ball retention seemed better in this World Cup than most others I can remember.
They created chances but were just not clinical enough.
Not down to lack of committment imo, just not quite good enough at either end of the pitch.
Only my opinion though
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I agree with Snookered.
Many of these players who play for teams that have progressed in the World Cup play for Premiership teams can't even get into their starting eleven at club level.
England's problem is that they badly need a solid defense to build on.
Even if we qualified I doubt if we would have gone much further than the quarter finals. I think the big problem for us goes right down into the grass roots of the structure here, it's the way kids are coached, and taught to the play the game, its the training of coaches and how much it costs to qualify as coach and the quality of coaches given to kids and it's how we bring youngster up through the systems too All that stuff has a knock on effect on the England team, until the FA finds a way to remodel the structure, finds a way to make the coaches qualification less expensive and the ratio of coaches improve, we will not have good young players playing in future World Cups. Simple as that. Not only that the FA itself needs to restructure too.
Cheer up lads...
England are a locked on certainty to win Russia 2018, if not France 2016.
How can we NOT win, with all of the valuable World Cup experience gained this time around by Luke Shaw, Jack Wilshere, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Ross Barkely?
They are clearly all far too exceptional and valuable to have their energies wasted in those silly under-17 and under-21 tournaments, but their collective 1,000 minutes of elite-level sitting down in Brazil will surely be our trump card in the next few tournaments.
Place your bets now.
would YOU have wanted to go all the way to Rio for football and spend the whole time on the bloody bench?
(02-07-2014 09:21 )Goodfella3041 Wrote: [ -> ]Cheer up lads...
England are a locked on certainty to win Russia 2018, if not France 2016.
How can we NOT win, with all of the valuable World Cup experience gained this time around by Luke Shaw, Jack Wilshere, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Ross Barkely?
They are clearly all far too exceptional and valuable to have their energies wasted in those silly under-17 and under-21 tournaments, but their collective 1,000 minutes of elite-level sitting down in Brazil will surely be our trump card in the next few tournaments.
Place your bets now.
Yes they are experienced but how many of our last crop of u-21's are in the national team now? six of the German side have come up through the u21's together. And I point back to what Stuart Pearce said. We have to make the U-21's the cornerstone of our international squad.
lol ... obviously the stridently sarcastic tone that I heard in my head did not come across in the words that I wrote!
I think it is absolutely ridiculous to bring a bunch of kids out to Brazil and sit them on the bench while we all engage in a collective national wankfest over one decent game by Sterling, which we ended up losing anyway.
Of course we need to take those junior tournaments more seriously. And, I'll be honest: no, I don't watch them and, no, I don't particularly care who wins at that level. But I do value their importance at producing not just better players, but better units of players -- groups of good young players that are accustomed to playing together for years before they even get a sniff of a World Cup bench.
And how long do they have to wait to get into the national side? how often do we bring in youngsters to play with those more experienced regulars? To me it looks like every so often we decide to mix it up, but often it' not done on a regular basis!! We should make sure that at least 5 or 6 of our u-21's are gradually introduced.
(02-07-2014 09:40 )Goodfella3041 Wrote: [ -> ]lol ... obviously the stridently sarcastic tone that I heard in my head did not come across in the words that I wrote!
don't worry, it did for most!
I see that Tim Howard set the record for the most saves made in a World Cup match last night.. He made 16 saves