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General Football & Sports / Re: Anything England Football
« on: March 25, 2024, 09:42:02 PM »This is by no means the best england side in my life time but it is relative to the other nations. Think back to that 2002 and 2006 world cup the golden generation we were still comfortably miles worse than the Italians, French, Germans, Brazilians and Argentines possibly even the Dutch.
Now by relative terms arguably besides the French we are the best side on paper. [I know we don't play on paper] a lot of the big hitters the Germans and the Italians don't have the persdonel they have had over past years and even the south American giants aren't all that. Don't think a good side has won the world cup since Spain 2010 the last few it's all been very marginal
Edit: to the point we are not the best ever but we are relatively and Southgate is blowing our chances at using our slight advantage. Next world cup has even more sides and more knock out so becomes even harder to win. He should have gone after he fluffed it v Croatia in world cup and if anybody had any doubts he should have gone after surrendering a 1-0 lead to Italy that was awful
This kind of proves my point about ignorance of the wider footballing world. That Croatia team had Brozovic - Modric - Rakitic in midfield, not one of England's midfielders in the squad was even close to their quality on the ball. You have that level of disparity in midfield you're going to be in trouble. But somehow, because its Croatia, and we're England, it was a crime we didn't beat the better team on paper.
The Italy game is a bit similar. It's not that we couldn't have won, or couldn't have done better but we lost on penalties to a team on a world record undefeated run with a midfield that was far superior to ours. You have the far superior midfield, you probably control the game. That's just the reality of football.