The Official England Thread-The Team We All Support [Vol 3]

And then leaves them on for the full 90minutes when they're obviously out on their feet!
Despite being bossed for the entire second half, it took him 25minutes to make a single substitution.

The worrying thing for me was how England retreated to their own area with zero challenging outside it, it was like a turkey shoot for the Italians, they really should have equalised at least.

Poor Gareth. First win in Italy since 1961, winning against a big team (which apparently he doesn't do), playing his defensive football (yet looking strangely attacking most of the game and leaving two of the best attacking players on the pitch when going down to ten men), starting the campaign with 3 points an away win that no one predicted, yet all the Ron Managers on PH just want to criticise and point out what they would have done better. He's got a win. He literally can't come home with any more points than that.
Had we lost, all the told-you-so's would be in their element, Gareth doesn't win big matches against big teams, etc.
We've won a game no one expected so it will be Italy were poor, etc. etc.
Poor bloke can't win even when he wins!

Its funny how harsh we are on our own players doing what Italians and many other nations have been doing for donkeys years. They learned the art of gaming the game a long time ago. No Italian will say that they were not Euro winners because their players fall over and scream at every opportunity.

I think the referee was way over zealous with the yellow cards, its quite normal for a centre back to take a free kick, see nothing, then step away and let another player play a different kind of pass this happens in every game every week. If the ref wanted to have absolute zero tolerance, then he should have booked the Italian right sided player who took about 20 seconds and walked about 20 yards with the ball in his hand in the second half, clearly time wasting, if you applied zero tolerance.

Second half England just went to pieces, I am not sure what Southgate said at half time but it obviously didn't work. The team, as a whole, dropped right back into our own box inviting them on. It was a clear change of tactics.

I'm pleased that some of our players have gone in the direction of "if you can't beat them...then you may as well join them".

I used to get so frustrated when England used to play the honest game years ago, when all the foreigners were playing the dirty/cheating game in comparison.

Yards not metres, but yes.

I was going to say Jimmy Greaves was the goal to game king of England. What a record he had.
I think you also have to consider the changing game, Kane plays as the lone striker, lots of stuff fed into just him.
Shearer was often sharing the goals with another striker as a front pairing.

I would still say Shearer as an out and out goal scorer is a better player than Kane.

Interesting. I'd have thought football, of all games, would have gone metric by now!

Did you read the guardian article last week about all these goalscoring records ? In a nutshell it’s easier to score nowadays hence why so many records being broken and why the gap between the best and worst teams is the widest it has been .