Tonight, I still cant get my head around the vast differences between the 1st half display and what came after this.
What we hear is this is a brave new, young England team. Yet from the moment the second half started why did this brave new football go out the window, and why did we start hoofing it at times to nobody upfield? We seem to just panic all of a sudden. What happened to the positive football? We just went back to being petrified and kept giving the ball away.
It doesn't matter if English footballers are young or old. We don't know how to deal with game management. Whether that is seeing a game out after taking the lead, killing the tempo and strangling the opposition or just having the nerve to keep making passes forwards instead of time after time going back to the goal keeper.
Against Denmark and Russia, Croatia had a lot less possession apparently than they did tonight. They play England and suddenly we make their team make pass after pass and can dominate us. Where was the press that we supposedly are meant to do? Our back 3, turned into a back 5.
Southgate has conducted himself brilliantly. Managed the team in a very professional way. Yet tonight highlighted tactical things he never seem to pick up in the game. People say this is the start of something but tonight he just watched and made like for like replacements and never once changed the system we played. I mean he could of tried and give Henderson some help, because Del Alli and Lingard couldnt really do this. Maybe pull Sterling (and then Rashford when he came on a sub) to a wide postion to stop the their full backs getting forward.
How can we look more tired than a team who played 120mins and went through the pressure of penalties twice in the last two rounds? How did that England team go from looking so fresh and fit to actually struggling to keep up with a team who made it look like England had been playing extra time against the Swedish.
I'm starting to think that its all in the head as to why we never can win these tournaments because we just dont seem capable of getting over the line. Doesn't matter it was 28 years ago or tonight. Doesn't matter that its against the Germans or the Croatians. We just don't have the mental fortitude to be the best national side in the world. You look at Neymar. You may not like him, but in 2016 Brazil and Neymar faced the biggest challenge for their country by winning the Olympic Gold that had eluded their country. This was after the disaster of the 2014 World Cup in their own backyard too. Yet despite all that pressure he went on to help them win that tournament. And that type of mental strength we haven't had for decades.
Of course you can still be proud of an achievement in a tournament where none of us expected to go deep into the knockout stages, but I do think expectations were so low that after losing to Iceland two years ago that wins against Tunsia, Panama, Columbia and Sweden meant we might of overagerated them some as to how good they actually were. These were all games that we were the favourites in and we were expected to go on and win them.
With question marks about Southgate's tactical ability within games unanswered and FA unable to do nothing as the pool of English players playing first team football within our own domestic top flight diminishes at significant rates I am fearing this may have been our best chance for years/or maybe in our lifetime.
What we hear is this is a brave new, young England team. Yet from the moment the second half started why did this brave new football go out the window, and why did we start hoofing it at times to nobody upfield? We seem to just panic all of a sudden. What happened to the positive football? We just went back to being petrified and kept giving the ball away.
It doesn't matter if English footballers are young or old. We don't know how to deal with game management. Whether that is seeing a game out after taking the lead, killing the tempo and strangling the opposition or just having the nerve to keep making passes forwards instead of time after time going back to the goal keeper.
Against Denmark and Russia, Croatia had a lot less possession apparently than they did tonight. They play England and suddenly we make their team make pass after pass and can dominate us. Where was the press that we supposedly are meant to do? Our back 3, turned into a back 5.
Southgate has conducted himself brilliantly. Managed the team in a very professional way. Yet tonight highlighted tactical things he never seem to pick up in the game. People say this is the start of something but tonight he just watched and made like for like replacements and never once changed the system we played. I mean he could of tried and give Henderson some help, because Del Alli and Lingard couldnt really do this. Maybe pull Sterling (and then Rashford when he came on a sub) to a wide postion to stop the their full backs getting forward.
How can we look more tired than a team who played 120mins and went through the pressure of penalties twice in the last two rounds? How did that England team go from looking so fresh and fit to actually struggling to keep up with a team who made it look like England had been playing extra time against the Swedish.
I'm starting to think that its all in the head as to why we never can win these tournaments because we just dont seem capable of getting over the line. Doesn't matter it was 28 years ago or tonight. Doesn't matter that its against the Germans or the Croatians. We just don't have the mental fortitude to be the best national side in the world. You look at Neymar. You may not like him, but in 2016 Brazil and Neymar faced the biggest challenge for their country by winning the Olympic Gold that had eluded their country. This was after the disaster of the 2014 World Cup in their own backyard too. Yet despite all that pressure he went on to help them win that tournament. And that type of mental strength we haven't had for decades.
Of course you can still be proud of an achievement in a tournament where none of us expected to go deep into the knockout stages, but I do think expectations were so low that after losing to Iceland two years ago that wins against Tunsia, Panama, Columbia and Sweden meant we might of overagerated them some as to how good they actually were. These were all games that we were the favourites in and we were expected to go on and win them.
With question marks about Southgate's tactical ability within games unanswered and FA unable to do nothing as the pool of English players playing first team football within our own domestic top flight diminishes at significant rates I am fearing this may have been our best chance for years/or maybe in our lifetime.