This tournament?! 
They’ve utterly useless since they put them there. Haven’t seen a single gutty call from then in any competition! Guy was 10ft away at most & you can see from the replay how Terry’s shin is well inside the goal-line when he clears!
Congrats to England, but clearly Ukraine was the better side today – just not where it counts: the scoreboard.
Shin? Try his whole body.
But that in itself doesn’t mean that the whole of the ball was over the whole of the line. I do think it was just over the line, though.
As for the extra referees, as I said before they do give decisions, we just don’t see them doing it. They have an electronic wand thingy and possibly a mike to communicate with the head referee. I have seen a bit of speculation that it is their presence that has led to less tugging and holding at in the penalty area in this tournament, and hence more headed goals.
I assume you’re not being serious, but that photo was clearly taken well after he’d kicked the ball.
This is as far as the ball got over the line. About a quarter of a ball width over the line; certainly less than half. At full speed it actually looked further over than it was.
Yes, I was being facetious vis-a-vis my “shin” comment – but no matter what angle you look at it, that is a legit goal.
Except from this angle that clearly shows Milevskiy was offside when the ball was passed to him. So play should have been halted before he even passed to Devic. 
Well…no, not really. The ball was over the line but there was a clear offside in the lead up to it so justice was done in the end.
As it happens, I’d favour goal line technology. In this case the goal would have been given and I can live with that. My real preference though would be to give each team three challenges for critical incidents. Similar to the situation in cricket. Then in this case, though the ball was over, a review of the build up would show the offside and correctly rule the goal out.
Seems to work well in Cricket (and Rugby in a slightly different way)
England seem to be sticking to a plan here. Be organised, solid defence, force the opposition to shoot from distance and looking to break where possible. It seems to be working but pretty it ain’t. However, we just don’t have the technical prowess to play any other way at the moment. The only glimmer is that we may get better as the tournament progresses but bloody hell, it’ll have to start soon. Sunday in fact!
The goal was offside but even if it had counted Ukraine would still have gone out.
I thought it was a deserved win. Ukraine were the home team so you expect them to get a bit of possession. England defended well, absorbed the pressure and created goal scoring chances every so often. It was a professional job.
Winning an away game at a time when you absolutely have to win it - in a competition. That’s not easy to do
I was pondering during the match… when’s the last time England went 2-0 up in a tournament fixture? Going 1-0 up always seems to be the cue for sitting back, trying to hang on and (against better opposition) conceding.
Not pretty, but job done, with the unexpected bonus of avoiding Spain. Ukraine unlucky with the disallowed goal, but it does look like the player was offside anyway. Only saw the first half, but we were largely outplayed. Looks like we were making more of an effort to keep hold of the ball, but we looked quite ponderous much of the time. Rooney was clumsy to begin with but improved as the half went on. That goal has to help his confidence, it’s his first in a tournament since 2004.
Not much to add that wasn’t said already, but I did like it when Ashley Young was fouled late in the match near the benches. He hopped up quickly, pissed off, and was about to yell at the offender. Then he saw it was Shevchenko, who was holding his hands up, and it was like Young was honored to be fouled by football royalty.
The ball clearly crossed the line on replay. That said, I couldn’t tell what had happened at game speed even though I was about a food away from my shiny new HDTV. As others have noted, it shouldn’t have mattered anyway because it was the result of an offside.
It’s not anything new. If anything, I think the difference is that there’s more mobility in the European leagues than 20 years ago. When I was a lad even English Premiership (or First Division, as it was then) teams might have had a couple of foreign first team players, and likely as not they’d both have been Scandinavian.
Now there are as many Italian, Spanish, French, German and Dutch players on English teams as on Italian and Spanish teams. I think that makes players less familiar with each other.
If anything, it should be an advantage for England, since more of the top English players stay in the Premiership.
It only has to be accurate in one axis. How hard could it be? There’s a laser thing on my garage door that tells it not to cut me in half if I accidentally stand under it while it’s closing. Obviously you couldn’t use that exact system, but you get my point. The sensor only has to detect when the ball passes a point on the ground. It doesn’t need to be able to tell how high the ball is or whether it’s on the right or the left.
I think that England’s group win is the most important consequence of the goal-that-wasn’t, but nobody seems to be talking about it. I would much rather play Italy at this point than Spain.
Well, England would still have won the group if it had been 1-1. Obviously the goal-that-wasn’t might have spurred Ukraine on, but in itself it didn’t change much.
A concern for England is how off-the-pace Rooney was. His goal has taken some attention away from a poor performance. I guess Hodgson’s thinking is that Rooney needs games to get match fit in time for stronger opposition, but that opposition comes up right now and it is alarming how much sharpness he has lost in five weeks out of competitive football. After 30 minutes he looked knackered, and his touch was poor throughout. Can he be match fit after just one game?
If the plan was to get out of the group by hook or crook and then unleash our secret weapon, I’m not sure it’s going to work. He was a passenger at times in that game, and we can’t afford passengers against Italy.
Isn’t this usually the case for Rooney with England? We all expect so much and he delivers so little. Not that I entirely blame him; he can’t be magic, and Ukraine probably expect Shevchenko to score 5 per match too. Surely part of the problem is that he is often closely and heavily marked. He was very rarely given any space against Ukraine. England need to stop passing to him just because it’s him, and either pass to him when he’s open, or when he’s not use him to draw defenders away from the other perfectly capable goal-scorers. I can’t help but think that everything worked better without him.
In honour of Rooney’s dodgy hair transplant, The Sun’s front-page headline this morning?
WEAVE DONE IT!
Genius.
2006 World Cup, when we beat Trinidad & Tobago 2-0 courtesy of some hair-pulling by Crouch and a nice curler from Gerrard.
“It’s sometimes tricky to get a result, even against the weakest team in the tournament” said the Trinidad manager afterwards.
I don’t know about anyone else but certainly amongst my chattering colleagues no-one is getting carried away. I know the media will cherry-pick any mouth-frothing goon they can get their hands on, but those of us not OD’d on cheap beer and Ukrainian prostitutes seem to be keeping expectations in check.
One one hand, Italy are beatable and we have topped probably the hardest group we’ve had in the last 20 years. euro’s or world cup (though world cup groups are normally easier).
On the other, we’re not showing too many signs of sparking into life. Organised but slightly inept just about describes it. The path to any final will probably look like Italy->Germany->Spain. We might get a result against any of those in a one-off game, but to string 3 such results together playing like we have?..nope, don’t see it.
I’m sticking with Germany and Spain and leaning more towards my lederhosen loving teutonic friends. I think Spain will struggle more against France than they would against England.
In my eyes, England have marginally over-achieved already. I thought that there was a significant chance of them not getting out of the group - so to top Group D out-performed what I’d initially hoped for (going through in second).
I expect us to lose to Italy - possibly in extra time or on penalties. I strongly suspect that one goal for Italy will be enough against England - the other way around, I think England will need to score 2 to have a chance of finishing Italy off. They’re a better defensive unit, keep the ball better than England and are more likely to have a lot more of the play as a result. England will need to take any chance that comes along pretty much (a miss like Rooney’s in the 1st half last night would probably be fatal). It can be done but Italy are the favourites.
I think Spain have a potentially tough road to the final - France played terribly against Sweden but have some talent and could pose them problems. I can see Portugal causing issues in the semi as well. Germany probably have the easiest road at the minute - as they should easily see off Greece and the winners of England/Italy as well. I think I’d go with Novelty Bobble and back them at this point (though you likely won’t get great odds).
For what is supposed to be the world’s most popular sport, it’s really hard to take football seriously if they don’t even know how to keep score. Hockey and tennis have much smaller objects moving a heck of a lot faster and somehow manage to get it right.
And don’t give me this bullcrap about how it would ‘interrupt the flow of play’ - so much as breathe on a player and he succumbs to the inevitable pull of gravity to flop around like a dying fish, then the team will make a three-act play out of taking the resulting free kick. There’s so much time-wasting going on it’s the only sport that adds time on at the end of each half to make up for it.
So, we have a sport that has more floppers than a Romney look-alike convention, where nobody knows how to keep score, with games that no one really knows how long will last (coupled with clear evidence that referees are significantly influenced by home/away crowd and proximity of the crowd to the pitch in how many minutes they add on to games when the home side is winning/losing).
And people wonder why it hasn’t really caught on in the US.
We do wonder some times, but rarely do we care.
