Go Iceland!!!
Beat France!!!
!!!
Awesome. Thoroughly deserved - hats off to Iceland.
Nothing will change. These lads are going to come home and it will all be forgotten by the first week in August when they line up for their club sides in “the greatest league in the world”. They’ll still get loads of adulation, fame and money and told how great they are. And all get bailed out by the Belgians in central defence for Spurs, or the French educated Mahrez and Kante for Leicester or the myriad other nationalities that bail out the English players playing for Manchesters United and City and Chelsea.
I can’t imagine who would want to manage this side now. They should do what we’ve done in cricket and rugby. Get an Aussie in!
Lol. That was a Scotland-level performance tonight by England.
Sports history. Feels like the Brazilian 1-7 whacking in 2014.
I feel like this tournament more than any I’ve seen has cemented how much the knockout format favours well-coached teams.
You can’t help but wonder what England might accomplish if they had an Antonio Conte on the sidelines, excoriating players for every misstep, as opposed to the ever-gormless Roy Hodgson. The man is so unfailingly listless that he invites the coining of the adjective “Hodgsonesque” to describe a performance so thoroughly uninspired that it borders on the spitefully negligent.
Hodgson resigns. No interview otherwise. No questions allowed from the media either. Hodgson has to take a hell of a lot of the responsibility. The selection, the tactics and the preparation have been revealed to be terrible.
The players cannot escape blame though. The system was fucked but Hodgson isn’t the one whose corners don’t beat the first man, who spoons free kicks and crosses deep and behind the bye line, whose first touch is terrible. The performance tonight was, aside from the systemic failures introduced by Hodgson, awful from the players. They have to shoulder responsibility too.
What is *wrong *with you, England???
There go my hopes for Three Lions vs. Die Mannschaft.
I for one would like to welcome the 3 lions joining us Dutchies here in the second tier. Have a stroopwafel.
While losing to Iceland twice (twice!:eek:) still burns, it now burns a little less harshly, it does.
Cumbrian, maybe you might want to revisit the Drinkwater, and also Albrighton discussion from the start of the thread. With Kante and Payet, France have decided upon form over reputation. Maybe England might have done better.
When Joey Barton speaks, you had better listen
Honestly, maybe you want to revisit that discussion as you’ll find that I wanted Drinkwater in the squad and said so more than once - even advancing a statistical argument as to why he should have been in the squad. You’re so keen on making the same point over and over again, you don’t seem to be able to see when people agree with you.
And as for Albrighton. How would a midfielder for a side that actively played without the ball for the whole season and then gave the ball to their most talented players on the break, when the opposition were playing a high line, exactly have helped trying to break down a succession of teams who defended their own penalty area and put 9 or 10 men behind the ball? We already have one guy who runs up and down a lot and passes the ball to supposedly more talented players in the squad. He’s called James Milner and he would have had the same effect as Albrighton would have on these performances - i.e. none. This is not because Albrighton (or even Milner) don’t have positive attributes, it’s because we don’t have any English footballers who have the skills to break down an opposition who sets out to prevent England from playing their preferred style - which would be on the break themselves.
But let’s say he’s actually a genuinely brilliant footballer, who has only just found the right team and that’s why he has only one decent season under his belt at senior level. Albrighton would have got the ball and found his club mate (Vardy) with no space to get over the top of defenders and no one of the skills of Mahrez to do anything positive with it else wise in a white shirt. He might not have miskicked the ball. He might have been able to trap a bag of wet cement. He might even have found one of his team mates with his passes. But Marc Albrighton is not some sort of genius orchestrator of tactical football and he wouldn’t have unlocked those defences himself. He doesn’t play for a side that does that himself and has shown no ability to do it anywhere else in his career. And even if he was, he’d have to be peak Maradona himself to lift tonight’s performance out of the gutter.
The only straw that I can clutch is that this set of performances reminds me a lot of England’s Rugby Union team this year. Almost exactly the same set of players that drastically under-performed at the World Cup have just been down under and beaten Australia 3-0 in a Test Series, after having been knocked out in the RWC Group Stages by them in September. The difference? Two key changes in personnel and a different management team. Some of these England players have promise. They need to be harnessed better. New management is a given. Where they’re going to get the equivalent of Maro Itoje (the key player who has effectively transformed how the England rugby team play) from is anyone’s guess though. And it is highly unlikely to be Marc Albrighton. Given the spark he showed in the 8 minutes he was on tonight, Marcus Rashford is probably the best bet for the time being.
Seen on reddit:
“Roy Hodgson, who gets paid £3.5 million a year to manage England, just lost to a Iceland manager who is a part time dentist. The total transfer value of all Iceland players combined is smaller than several individual England players.”
"- 3.5 million pounds? Is that like 400 Euros?
- Too soon? Nah."
England’s best player by far in this game was Rashford, who did more in 4 minutes (another thing to blame the coach for that he was not brought on earlier) than his team mates in 90+.
I thought that was Hodgson’s biggest error by far. I thought he should have started. I’m pretty sure I’m on record here for saying that he is fast, skillfull, imaginative and confident, exactly what we needed given our inability to unlock defences with any other set-up. OK, perhaps not start with him but to give him just over 5 minutes at the end is frankly insulting.
Personally though I put the biggest blame on the players rather than the coach. They are simply not technically good enough. Time after time their close control let them down, an inability to pass in tight areas, simple balls not going to feet, not moving, not offering the runs, aimless shots and long balls. Kane’s 41 yard free kick near the end was utterly brainless.
This is all basic stuff and should be instinctive by the time they reach the national team.
A good plan from the coach is only any use if the players have the technical ability to execute it. They aren’t as good as their inflated wages and audiences make them think they are. The Premier League may be entertaining but any technical quality there is does not come from the home-grown players.
But well done Iceland, I wanted that to be the last point to make.
One thing I’ve noticed as a Scot working in England over the last 15 years: when I first came down, Euros and WCs (e.g. 2002/2004) were greeted with a wave of mindless optimism, with everyone in the office convincing themselves that getting to the semis was a mere formality and from that point England were definitely in with a good shout. And I admit I derived a certain amount of amusement from watching this hubris break against the reality of quarter-final exits. (Even in group phases, the phrase “mathematically we can still win”, uttered by a guy who’d been predicting a cruise to the final two weeks ago, had a certain comedy value).
But over time the lessons have been learned. England fans now have pessimism level that nearly matches the Scots. There’s still a vague sense that failure to get through the group stages is an aberration rather than a likely outcome, but overall expectations have fallen a long, long way.
Tyldsey and Hoddle commentating last night were the last vestiges of this sense of entitlement, failing to recognise that Iceland were a quality team who were in the competition on merit and treating them as a San Marino-esque bunch of part timers. In fact, of course, Iceland played good football and - what might have been the real difference - kept their nerve.
I did some quick back of fag packet calculations this morning. I’m 35 years old and this is England’s record in the stages after the first round of the Euros and the World Cup in my lifetime.
P19 W5 D9* L5
Goals For 22
I didn’t bother totting up the goals against.
*Draws = 1W on pens, 6L on pens 2D - due to the weird 2nd phase group stage in 1982.
Examine this a bit more closely - 8 of those 19 games happened between 1982 and 1990 (I chucked in the 3rd/4th place playoff from 1990). They account for 10 of 22 goals England scored. So, in the last 26 years of international tournaments England have played 11 knock out games and scored 12 goals in them.
Our wins are against the might of Paraguay, Belgium, Cameroon, Ecuador and Denmark. Our one winning draw was against Spain, at home, in the period before Spain got their act together internationally. We have been beaten by Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Italy (that 3rd placed game) and now Iceland. Of the draws, the 6 losing draws are against West Germany, Germany, Argentina, Italy and Portugal twice.
The thing is, given this, how has it taken so long to get to the point you’ve raised in your quote above? 1990 and Euro 96 have a lot to answer for, in my opinion. We’ve never really been that good in my whole lifetime - and when I guess you could argue that we might have been (in the 80s and 1990), I was basically too young to really remember it. Euro 96 is the one tournament where we played reasonably well (knocking the Netherlands out in the group) but even then, we were at home.
Taken at face value, the conclusion has to be that, if England do qualify for a knockout phase of a tournament, they’ll score a goal and get knocked out. Where this particular game fits into the narrative is that before now our role was to either not qualify (or in 2014 not get out of quite a tricky group filled with decent sides) or get knocked out by a big, established football power. Now we’ve been beaten by Iceland in a knock out game, the last vestiges of expectation should be kicked out of us.
1990, right ? I’m still smarting from Platt’s goal at the last minute of extra time, after a match where Scifo hit the woodwork twice :mad: .
Yeah, quite so. I don’t remember much of that match (I was 8) but that’s probably the best win in the knockout stages England have going for them in my lifetime, given the standard of the opposition. Belgium got to the semis of the previous World Cup didn’t they?
Best win and we needed Scifo to hit the woodwork twice and claw a wondergoal out of our arses in the last minute of extra time.
You can always tell when an American news/sports service is using an English writer - the story about England underachieving in a soccer match is larded with shrieking denunciations about “disgraced”, “shameful”, “embarrassment” etc. And of course that’s mild compared to what the U.K. papers are saying. Does someone think this inspires the team to better efforts? And it’s not as if you lost a war or something.
This has to be the worst thing about soccer - hearing about what a country are. Is!
I liked a twitter quote I saw somewhere: This is literally the worst day in English history since Friday.