AdebolaCornflakes
Vital Football Legend
This is international football.
You don't just outscore the opposition because defending is a lot easier than attacking. Stopping goals is a lot easier than scoring them.
England go gung ho, "hey, we have Bellingham and Foden and Kane" etc- and all that will happen is that teams will set up to stop them, deny them space, frustrate them.
Then they will exploit our absolutely shite defence to nab a goal and defend Rorkes Drift for the rest of the game not giving us a peek.
It doesn't matter how good Bellingham is if he has 11 men in front of him and no space to run into
And teams will do that because they know they can defend and we cant
Agree with all of this, plus the fact that teams do not win tournaments by going 'all out attack'. The Spain team of 2010 is regarded as one of the best international teams ever, yet they only won one game by more than a single goal, didn't score more than 2 in a game and won all of their knockout games 1-0.
I've really cooled on Southgate since the World Cup but this desire to see him basically play a team of attackers and ignore the defence is nuts - we'd be out in the group stages.