Tragic Football Stories - Let us Kick Around the misshapen Jabulani that is English football right here

yeah I've seen the croatian midfield. England produce talented players.

there's a wilful blindness throughout football culture in England. players whose position as superstars is established on some good performances early in their careers and are subsequently never scrutinized. the cult of the Sky-approved big dogs

aye I said last night there seemed to an air of "How is this happening? We play in the best league in the world!" that didn't take account of a) maybe it isn't, really and b) the best players in it are all from other countries e.g.Uruguay

hmm talented but not rounded, not functional in modern systems, skill sets based on playground games or needlessly focused on one or two aspects unbecoming an actual useful adult player cf quote about Gerrard from arrigo

i just think we have v different ideas of what makes a talented player which is fair enough

you're both right

pretty obv why ur modern day spurs fan will emphasise why talent on its own is meaningless tho

far be it from me to argue with ilx's official scout tbf

p much everyone i work with has come by my office with a concerned expression and asked me how i am doing, i guess because i took at the afternoon off to watch the game. it is nice i guess but it is difficult to articulate the complex relationship of an english football fan with the national side via the medium of small talk. for some reason i started off sort of playing up to the sympathy because it seemed expected, acknowledging the disappointment, whatever, but that wore away with repetition and eventually i was just "worthless shower, tournament is better off without them tbh".

Yeah I think England have talented players tbh. There's been a great deal of tactical ineptitude for Hodgson in this tournament

england produce talented players, one of the best five players in the world came from southampton. him and ramsey would most probably change the conversation a lot.

but there has been so much said about continental FAs working to get each team produce a level of excellence that is missing. That is why I made the dig about learning to head at Stoke. Arsenal, Utd, Palace, Southampton, Spurs, Liverpool and Everton. Maybe one or two other teams and the odd guy who will stand out wherever he would have been trained. Thats all that is providing half good options out of the leagues and leagues of training grounds and qualified coaches in England. Germany have half the teams and most probably could have selected an alternative 23 that would have had a chance of winning. Spain and France too, to a lesser extent. Whereas we are still left hoping Gerrard can do it because none of the 92 have made ONE obvious and ready successor in the past 15 years.

Im sure there is a lot that can be said about potentially good players like rodwell sinclair zaha etc. being snapped up by big clubs only to be benched for years instead of developing (and a lot of this has happened postabramovich chelsea) but barca dont play the likes tello that often or madrid morata etc. - so it only seems noticable when talent is sparce.

tello and morata haven't won any world cups yet

ok but promising players become good players by getting regular playing experience and only 23 out of thousands will win a world cup anyways so idg yr point

Arry Redknapp on the radio now - "I don't understand why England keep failing, we've got good players, we've got good managers, look at some of those other teams their players wouldn't get a game in the Premier League, I thought we'd win that group, we've got very good players, I don't understand it"

Rooney - "We don't kick people enough" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/england/10917358/Wayne-Rooney-England-are-too-nice-to-win-World-Cup-we-need-to-develop-nastiness-in-way-we-play.html

do these fucks never learn

they don't kick ppl *properly*, its true. English yellows/reds/penalties are generally crimes of passion and not profit

The worst of Arry's remarks was "oh Costa Rica beat both Uruguay and Italy, its all you need to know about that group". This notion that Costa Rica are a good team doesn't get through. Mindless cunt.

Costa Rica lost twice to Honduras in the last year. Honduras are not a good team.

I don't think it's a stretch to say England could have had a tougher group.

From the two games I've seen they've shown a better game in the tournament itself. Uruguay and Italy have I'm sure underestimated Costa Rica, but that's their problem (its not as if both don't know they can't lose to minor teams, and they have of course done so in their long history at the wc)

Ian Wright has the answer:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bq2HpOSIMAAjQuR.jpg

lolll

you've probably all seen this but i just want it here for posterity

Ray Wilkins, who won more than 80 England caps, wanted England’s defence to be more physical and test Suárez’s recovering left knee. “I’m not an aggressive person in my nature but Suárez has just come back from a cartilage operation five weeks ago,” he told Sky Sports News. “His training has been OK from what we’ve heard. Did we make enough physical contact to see if his knee is OK? In my opinion, no we didn’t.

“I’m not saying we should have kicked lumps out of him but we could have made a couple of tackles within the rules of the game to see if his knee was legit.”

This is the most repulsive development of this decade, all this insidious Help For Heroes at football matches shit. Go shove a fucking depleted uranium tip up your fucking arsehole Wrighty!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa2EplzQ7xA

Wilkins demonstrating the sort of hard man shit he used to pull, testing the referee's knee

England don't have the players to play dirty even if they wanted to.

cattermole?

"Roy Hodgson is a likeable man who's very good with the press. But if this was Fabio Capello he'd be getting pelters."

Scholesey otm

appointment of hodgson in itself was a good way of normalising expectations

like

"We're shit. We're likely to remain so. We'd better get a shit manager."

?

Seems to me that a moderation of the absurdly high expectations of England fans and the English press is to be welcomed; while we could decide that it's just little-Englandism finding another outlet it doesn't feel that way to me.

Having said that, it would only take a few convincing victories to re-kindle the fire of unrealism, I'm sure.

what Tim said.

hodgson isn't a shit manager and England aren't shit. they get to most tournaments and lack the ability/cuteness to perform at those.

appointing a manager above and beyond that level wasn't rly fair on him.

hodgson isn't a shit manager and England aren't shit.

Given what you've seen of the other three teams in that group would you say one barely contested point from nine is an indicator of not being shit?

Would you say the manager's insistence that if he had the same games over there's nothing he would do differently as an indicator of not being shit?

Waddle was going off about a lack of interest in ball skills at the junior level yesterday and Shearer / Lineker were nodding furiously but idk how you go about changing the mentality of a nation of coaches and kids.

Hodgson may or may not have reasons for what he said about not changing anything - most likely he means that given what he knew at any given point he stands by the decisions he made, I don't suppose he means "oh if I'd known how the game was going to go I wouldn't have told Glen Johnson to get in the way of that cross."

Also, taking what football people say in interviews seriously is madness, judging their quality on what they say in interviews even more so.

i hear that a lot - "a lack of interest in ball skills"

the ball is the only piece of equipment in the fucking game, what other skills are there

tackling iirc

also running and jumping

and positional awareness

xpost Running up and down skills, falling over skills, being too honest skills, refereee intimidation skills. Oh and positional skills but we're less interested in those than we are in ball skills, so ignore those for now.

idk, like is capello shit? Sven?

Shouting and pointing skills! How could I forget? The main attribute of any great captain.

emoting skills

emote control?

Also, taking what football people say in interviews seriously is madness, judging their quality on what they say in interviews even more so.

It's evidenced in his team selection too. A couple of weaving but unproductive runs from Sterling and a Sturridge tap in convinced him he'd picked such a good team to play Italy he shouldn't change a single player for Uruguay.

idk, like is capello shit? Sven?

Capello seemed unable for the most part to get tournament performances out of decent England players. Sven I think did mostly ok with what was at his disposal.

There's a whole load of expectation management issues in how a manager's success is judged. I personally think losing in the last 8-16 is a reasonable expectation for a nation of England's size and talent pool. Losing in the groups is a failure.

to me Hodgson didn't look fully comfortable adopting the style of play needed to get the most out of his better players i.e. the younger forwards, so he ended up with a kind of bad faith mish-mash that didn't work particularly in any area.

plus saddled with the usual bottlers/showboaters etc

the sturridge tap in was an excellent move tbf

xxp

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/28122235

The senior players sense it if you doubt yourself and, if they sense a weakness, their natural instinct is to see if you can push a player down now and again to see if they can come back up.

There was not a chance of that happening with Pogba. I remember Paul Scholes kicking the living daylights out of him in every single training session, every day.

But he earned our respect by never moaning, never shouting and never making a fuss.

But he earned our respect by never moaning, never shouting and never making a fuss......and getting the fuck out and away to Juventus soon as he possibly could

Capello is pretty obviously not right for international management.

I mean I pity him for having to take over a load of flakes like England and Russia but the sort of characters who work at club level don't always work at international level.

tournament management maybe, but he qualifies like a MF