From Sjaak : Italy and Uruguay
Sorry Myles, that must have been hard to watch.
Costa Rica are a better team and that hurts England.
Frankly, with the amount of people living in the UK, I am surprised of the ineptitude on display with the national team.
The EPL’s way of buying success is hurting the England team.
Time for an overhaul? What’s your take?
Myles says:
I’m not disappointed.
I’m alright, Sjaak.
I know how inept England usually are because I’ve been watching them all my life.I’ve reported England from Wembley between 1982 and 2002 and I’ve blogged about England every season since 1998.
We never led against Italy and we never led against Uruguay.
Our defending was feeble and our game-management pitiful.
A draw against Italy would not have been a bad result.
Expectations in London were less this time, definitely.
I didn’t see a lot of cars with red and white flags this summer. People guessed what was coming because they remembered South Africa.
I hoped, as usual, for respectable failure.
Roy Hodgson was seen as a safe pair of hands who would not drop the ball too often. But we lost the first game without ever leading – and we lost the second game without leading, so we were out of the World Cup after six days.
Our pampered players all live in a bubble. None has ever played abroad or had to adapt to a different culture or a new league or a strange language. Half of them have never played in the Champions League.
Poor old Rooney has become the sacred cow of the England team.
We all have to tiptoe round the sacred cow and give her maximum respect .I’ve been a Rooney fan for a decade, written about him a lot, talked about him to everyone I know. But this season I realised that his absence is the only way forward.
The England team cannot improve while Rooney is in the squad.
In our warm-up games, our attacks were constipated by Rooney’s slow, selfish play. So I knew that Wayne would huff and puff and struggle in Brazil.
Tony Gale says we need to move the ball more quickly but I don’t think we can do that while Rooney constipates the build-up.
Yes,of course, we have many problem areas, multiple deficiencies.
But Rooney now blocks our way forward, if there is a way forward.
No “overhaul” is possible while he’s still there.
This short piece by young David Runciman makes a couple of points.