Ramsdale at fault again, should be saving that. Hopefully, this nonsensical talk of dropping Pickford will now stop.
Ramsdale at fault again, should be saving that. Hopefully, this nonsensical talk of dropping Pickford will now stop.
Whoop. Best group of players in a generation, lads.
Enough is enough. Mancini out.
@Yevrah
It's been an honour serving on team Southgateisshit since day 1 with you brother.
England don’t look coached.
England have started with their second choice keeper, some dude I've never heard off at centre back and a combination of Bowen, Gallagher and Phillips in midfield. It's not entirely surprising it's pretty bad.
This has all the look of a burst bubble. Mainly because, in the early part of Southgate's reign, the new faces seemed to relish the call up.
That Stones red card. 😂😂
That second yellow card decision is almost as bad as the England performance.
Players are tired, this isn't the best team, thank god the Qataris bribed their way to hosting and this isn't happening in an actual tournament etc.
Also, someone decent needs to sign Bellingham and coach him properly. Every now and then you can see he has tremendous ability/potential, but I doubt the Dortmund conveyor belt is really going to improve him in any way other than pitting him against inferior/suicidal opposition for stat padding/fee boosting.
Given the cost of loving crisis and all we should probably be made to play more games behind closed doors to protect people from wasting their money coming to watch.
What’s gone on there? Was that at Wembley?
Molineux or however you spell Wolves ground.
Welcome brother, proud to have you.
I mean, I don't think he's shit, he's just nowhere near as good as people seem to think or a semi-final and a final (on face value) would have you believe. He's benefitted from being our manager at a time when international football has rarely been weaker and the two easiest draws I've seen us get in my lifetime (by some margin) and lost in exactly the same way in the second one as he did in the first.
I've seen nothing to suggest he's able to kick on and either make us good enough defensively to hang onto a lead against a genuinely good side or potent enough up front to not have to need to. As I'm sure you all know I gave up on us ever winning anything in my lifetime after the debacle in 2010, but as we're here now and the field is a pretty weak one we really should be doing better at seizing the opportunity. Put simply, I expect more/or to at least be entertained - if Sir Gareth can deliver that all power to him, but if he can't we need to have another go at finding someone who can. We shouldn't be accepting the semi and the final on face value and believing everything is great as a result. Scratch the surface, or watch the turgid shite that's been served up four games running over the last week and it clearly isn't.
You don't understand how much England have disappointed at every tournament I've watched. The results he's achieved is a million miles away from what was before.
For me he's sort of moulded the best bits of Sven (realising our limitations and setting our stall out to cover said limitations) and then combined it with the worst crab like passing aspects of a Guardiola side. It's a take and with a fair bit of luck we'd have probably reached a World Cup final and won a European Championships. Problem is, relying on luck to make that extra push is not a sound strategy, one needs to grab these chances by the scruff of the neck, they don't come along very often and to get two in a row is remarkable.
He’s like OGB in that he has a very obvious ceiling in what he does and no amount of hoping is going to make him better than that.
What he has done well is to get England to perform slightly better than par and string together 2 decent looking performances in tournaments which hasn’t been done in my lifetime.
The other side is he consistently shits the bed whenever he comes up against anyone semi-decent and it’s so dull to watch. Even that Scotland game last year was awful and let’s face facts they are crap. I have no real interest in England and his style of football definitely isn’t drawing me in.
See I'd say Sven did string two decent performances together in 2002 and 2004, the results weren't quite as good but then we ran into Brazil in the first and Rooney got injured when we were on top against Portugal in the second.
Kalvin Phillips should never play for England again.
And that must be one of our worst results ever, whether it came in a glorified friendly or not.
Woah it was 4-0? I wasn't paying enough attention to England to say I said he was shit on Day One, but I definitely said it during the World Cup, so I'm claiming original status as well.
Anybody that backed both Bruce and Southgate should really retire from football discussion.
I will not be silenced.
Although, with Southgate, I've just been flummoxed by it all. We've had good managers (of which, I don't really think Southgate is one) and good players before, but I've never seen it come together like the last four years.
Their front four in the final was Matuidi, Griezmann, Mbappe and Giroud. I don't really see how you can reconcile France good and England bad at the same time.
There definitely aren't many international sides with as many game winning players as England have at the moment.
Anyway, point was that safety first, second and third football might be good enough to win something if you have Mbappe and maybe one or two of the others, but we don't, so it won't be and we'll be even further away if we get a draw reminiscent of an actual international tournament again.
Half the team picks itself, he picks the other half wrong, and then he stands there and does nothing. The fact that we have Quality in depth for the first time ever is the point.
I get the enjoyment aspect of Southgate, with Eriksson we had a nice run of quarter finals and what could have been which was an embarrassment of riches compared to the turgid 10 years that followed. Seeing us now reach a World Cup semi and an actual major final has been great fun particularly with a knockout win over Germany and winning a WC shootout, even if we've not been playing the best football or had the luck of the draw or anything that may be in spite of or because of him.
There's been some shit along the way like losing 0-0 to Scotland and both the Croatia and Italy defeats following the same pattern of us scoring early and then absolutely shitting it that I'm sure another manager would have been better equipped to deal with, but I've seen so much rubbish with England I'm happy for him to continue until his resignation the day after our second round exit in November.
Southgate is a good strategist but a dire tactician. The opposite of, say, Mourinho.
I can't see him ever leaving, though. The FA is one of the most conservative sporting bodies in the world and he fits them perfectly. Also got the M&S housewives' favourite brand going which they will adore.
I think far too much is being read into this. It's a bullshit friendly tournament that alot of players have been very vocal about not wanting. They want to fuck off on holiday and who can blame them really?
That's how I would have took it but it seems that people actually hate Gaz.
It's the same old thing, if you play cautious football you absolutely have to win. People will give you a few bad results if you're going for broke.
Playing with 8 defenders given the squad available to him is laughable. I honestly think that team got to those tournament finishes on the back of their own quality and in spite of his awful tactics rather than because of them. Under a manager who could just pick the right team we'd have won those Euros.
Facht.
Yep, like all the other times.
Where's James with the stats?
The last 16 win over Germany was a decent win. His other knockout games have all been either scraped through, against weak opposition, or both.
We currently have the best squad (or to probably be more accurate, the best suited squad to actually forming a functioning team) that we've had in my lifetime by some way.
Before there's always been a gaping issue somewhere e.g. the left wing + non-functioning central midfield problems which plagued the GOLDEN GENERATION.
The closest we have to that currently is Spackford.