England 0 Italy 0 AET
Italy won 4-2 on penalties
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We played far too deep.
We parked the bus. And Pirlo ran the game.
Parking the bus and marking Pirlo are two contradictory concepts.
You can do one or the other. You can’t do both.
But we took Italy to extra time and penalties.
We didn’t have a kick for the first four minutes and then we did OK for 15 minutes and then up till 90 we were battered.
In extra time, we were battered again.
So I spent more than 90 minutes waiting to lose. And waiting to lose is horrible. Waiting to lose gives me a hollow feeling.
England had nothing in midfield, nothing in attack, but somehow it was still 0-0 after 120 minutes.
Before the game I’d wondered: If Rooney is crap, will Roy yank him off?
Rooney was our worst player by some distance, so the strategy of Waiting for Wayne was a spectacular failure
The best way forward might be to rebuild the England team without Rooney, but I can’t see Hodgson doing that.
Kiev revealed a nation of yeomen, a regiment of honest spear-carriers.
Italy missed chance after chance.
Without firepower, they cannot beat Germany on Thursday. And the Germans will not stand and watch Pirlo do what he did here.
So it looks like a Spain-Germany final on Sunday night
That will be a good contest. This wasn’t .
I didn’t see any interviews or any BBC comments.
On Pirlo, ITV pundit Roy Keane said, “They never got near him. He dictated the pace of the game. Nobody got stuck into him. We mentioned before the game that one of the strikers might have to drop in. Nobody did. Gerrard and Parker never got near him.”
Gareth Southgate said, “The game was played at a tempo that allowed Pirlo to express himself. He wants to play at a slow pace and because of the way we played, he was allowed to do what he wanted.”
The knowledgeable Jamie Carragher said, “To me that’s not a great Italy team, that’s an average Italy team. And they made England look very poor.”