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

yeah i think maybe that's a thing?

we all remember big mick's big shorts

xxxp to nv

I was in the corridor when we scored

I am in my late twenties fyi yes

1st half v Wales was the best I've seen them play. The "Look, 4-3-3, it's how Barcelona play!" thing really seemed to work. Then they got bored and got hammered by Switzerland.

jesus Big Mick in them shorts with his legs splayed i had to keep covering my eyes

i remember him saying "fucking breeny" all goggle eyed when breen scored v saudi arabia

i remember the three-stage jaw drop when keane scored against germany, pythonesque but not the way you think

i was just as happy about that goal as i was becks pen, no lie

"C'est La Vie" as those lovely Irish popsters B*witched use to say!

is he riiiight?

^ meant to go on "My client became a YouTube sensation at the age of 12" - rolling off-season/transfer speculation thread 2011

wonderin tbh

On the other hand, England go above Brazil in world rankings.

Ireland almost cracking the top 30. Yes!

prob deservedly so

Emphatically not an xp

The future's bright. U17 WC was on in the pub tonight. Our England beat the bloody Argies on penalties. Some Sunderland GK was the hero. Golden years, golden years. Absolutely terrible match, but I don't know what a U17 game normally looks like tbh.

Well Germany up next and they just demolished USA so hold that thought.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cbq7gX1aTM

dirty cheating foreigners with their newfangled "route eins" and deflected-in punts from the d

love it when teams "pay the ultimate price" for a defensive balls-up btw

lollll as if any proof were necessary this is all a perpetual loop of failure that "caskey" you hear there is... yes, that's right... THE SON OF DARREN CASKEY

3. At 07:40 28th Sep 2011, mickey6chins wrote:
I agree they should look beyond Redknapp, but Wenger? That man has been found out to be tactically inept. Ian Holloway would be my choice.
complain about this comment

Mickey6chins

Mar 31st 2011, 8:10

Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura how to make slow mo funny

Comment by mickey6chins posted Thursday, October 21, 2010 - 18:25

Quite agree Adrian, I understand if Henry come back the guy was a legend but Eduardo was not quite as deserving. Polite applause would have sufficed.

http://www.thefa.com/England/All-Teams/Players?p=348072

who better to wear the three lions

http://indepth.news.sky.com/InDepth/topic/Jasper_Johns_And_Everton_F.C.

lolz

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/green-light-for-u21s-league-to-replace-reserves-7622226.html

kept meaning to start a "defend the fucking indefensible: EPPP" thread but that there's actually a good move

otm

Can we incorporate 'Tango' into the thread title in honour of the Official Football of Euro 2012?

"It Takes Roo To Tango".

not bad

Roo no when you've been tango'd

30 Cristiano Ronaldo has had more shots in his first four games at Euro 2012 than the entire England squad (29) had at the tournament

20 Italy had more shots on target in their quarter-final match than England had in total in their four matches in Ukraine

88 England conceded more than twice as many shots to France, Sweden, Ukraine and Italy than they had against those teams

39 England had on average 39% of the possession in their four games, their lowest figure at a tournament since Euro 1980

29 Ashley Young and James Milner put in 29 crosses in the four games. Only three reached an England team-mate

300 England averaged 300 passes per match. The four semi-finalists have averaged 479

15 England completed only 15 passes in the 15 minutes of the second period of extra-time against Italy

18 England's most successful passing combination against Italy was the goalkeeper Joe Hart to the substitute striker Andy Carroll

115 Andrea Pirlo had more passes against England than England's four starting midfielders had against Italy

18 Mesut Ozil has created 18 chances in Germany's four games. Steven Gerrard, England's most prolific chance creator, has made six

102 England ran on average 102km in their four matches. Italy ran 7.5km further on average per match

86 England have had the most tackles in the tournament, with Steven Gerrard's 18 the most of any player

29 England have blocked the most shots at Euro 2012, 17 more than Italy, 19 more than Germany, 21 more than Portugal and 24 more than Spain

18 England's most successful passing combination against Italy was the goalkeeper Joe Hart to the substitute striker Andy Carroll

with success like this, who needs failure

absolutely bored blue in the face by the amount of total shite cliché-mongering about "grassroots" and "teaching a kid to keep the ball" etc etc being bandied about by clueless morons lately. it's like there are 5/6 really facile ideas of what good development is and now every talking head is wheeling them out gormlessly.

I do find the process quite interesting though, how the country manages to be consistently fifteen years behind continental thinking. It's also interesting how the top clubs aren't, and how that doesn't feed into the national culture.

There were a couple of pieces about Chris Waddle last week, with him banging the drum for players going abroad to gain experience and understand the game better. I agree with him, but he and I are more old men shouting at clouds than ever.

i don't think anybody could seriously argue that England is poor at developing players, but the causes and the necessary direction are more complicated than most pundits want to address, even if they were capable. think what LG's getting at is really the same old shitty standard of punditry, a lot of the guys who are now "train our 8 year-olds to play like Barca" were denying there was even a problem 4 years ago.

that England isn't poor at developing players, sorry

I know, but there's no point arguing about the quality of punditry - you're more likely to get a proper overhaul of the national game first. In fact that might even be a prerequisite.

this may be a stupid question but i'm going to ask it anyway -

if stevie g, of the famous sacchi quote, grew up playing for a more *footballing* manager/side in '99 or whenever he debuted - would he still have turned out the brute force he was or would he have been more like a cesc or schweini? or even do you think he could have adapted and excelled if he went to idk barca instead of deco?

absolutely bored blue in the face by the amount of total shite cliché-mongering about "grassroots" and "teaching a kid to keep the ball" etc etc being bandied about by clueless morons lately. it's like there are 5/6 really facile ideas of what good development is and now every talking head is wheeling them out gormlessly.

― Know how Roo feel (LocalGarda), Thursday, 11 October 2012 09:14 (1 hour ago)

yeah but do you not find it fascinating at how many top level british footballers cannot string a set of passes together under pressure? it is by all means an inane and simplified view these pundits are taking but teaching kids to be able to trap, control and move the ball under pressure IS one of the MANY things severely lacking in english football.

iirc gerrard played under evans/houilier/rafa none of whom I'd argue were necessarily adverse to cesc type players. So if his development was a 'problem' I'd say it was one that happened earlier than when he was in his late teens. I'm not sure that I'd want him to have developed any other way than he has tbh. At his best he was a marauding force of nature, at his worst tactically undisciplined and hugely wasteful in possession, but the overall package still a big plus for LFC at least.

did e/h ever try to work on his tactics and possession game tho? maybe it was a bit late for rafa and he never really tried to change it. did liverpool settle for someone who was very good right out of the gate and not push to improve him to become a step better? or do you think the damage* was done long before then?

*this is obv not the right word but you know what i mean

that's otm, but putting the focus on gerrard as individual player isn't really the angle to look at, maybe

some key issues

• no other country in the world afaik has over 100 full-time professional clubs
• clubs reject a lot of kids before they're 16 predominantly on grounds of size and strength
• kids are encouraged to play in competitive games from a v. early age
• a lot of English fans don't like to watch teams holding onto the ball and not getting it forward at the first opportunity
• distinct lack of children's coaches with more than rudimentary coaching quals

so Gerrard's an example of a good product of the existing system as far as i can see, the problem is much more about what kind of players we produce other than Gerrards

i wasn't trying to get off subject asking about gerrard btw, he just seems the figure head of the 'control the ball' basics nonsense that pundits are focussing in on when they should have a list like noodle's.

a lot of English fans don't like to watch teams holding onto the ball and not getting it forward at the first opportunity

is this true? or is it only true because teams don't hold on to the ball very well and fans associate it with problems and potential failure?

no other country in the world afaik has over 100 full-time professional clubs

i don't see how this is correlated with us having distinctly LESS coaches than other countries and less coaches who know what they are doing - surely these places should be the breeding ground for those who go out into the community, invite to spend a week w/ their local u10s or something etc.

i... think so? Focusing on the faults of the top end players isn't a true reflection of the system- particularly as many of those players really only excel, it seems to me at times, through exceptional prowess at things that can't really be attributed to coaching or technical training- maybe that's unfair, to idk lampard and ferdinand, and i'm overfocusing on gerrard myself.

xp- re: slow build up- english football fans are addicted to drama, and they demand it from their players afaict

yeah but otoh stoke and west ham are the most boring teams in the league for a reason and west ham were losing paying fans by the ton last season as they got more bigsamish

West Ham are one of those clubs with an alleged history of playing cultured football. i think there's a difference between fans who attend regularly, are paying silly money for a ticket and therefore wanna be entertained to some extent and fans who rarely attend, predominantly care about the result and probably care less about the quality of the football that achieves it. but i can imagine the good citizens of Stoke enjoying nothing more than 90 minutes of gladiatorial savagery once a fortnight.

the thing about the ridiculous number of pro clubs is that there's a much larger pool of employment for effective but low-skilled journeyman, and the development staff at a lot of those clubs are probably much more interested in finding lads who are gonna be the next lumpen stopper/target man than watching slight 10 year-olds fannying around trying to be Messi. something about having clubs so far down the tiers where winning is so essential has a distorting effect on our game i think.

i can understand that