Bearing in mind that the best 4 our of the 6, 3rd place teams go into the knock out stages then I wouldn't imagine we'd struggle to get into the knockout stages. That said, if you come 3rd in the group you end up playing one of the 1st places in another group. Which clearly means it's very easy for you to lose at the first knock out round before the quarters because you're playing some very hard opponents.
It's important we don't do what we've done in recent years, similar to Arsenal, and make it hard on ourselves by losing early matches, crawl through and end up in a game against some much harder teams early on.
If we win the group we would play the best 3rd placed group of A, C or D.
If we came 2nd, we would play the 2nd placed team of group F (You'd think this would be one of Portugal/Austria)
If we came 3rd, we would play the 1st placed team in C1 or D1. So potentially Spain or Germany. This clearly makes it very hard to progress if you come 3rd.
Many will say, if you want to win, you have to beat the best and it shouldn't matter when you play them, which of course is true, but these are probably the same people that will knock England for only getting to the Quarter Finals of a competition when we go out against Germany or something, and praise other teams who simply get into the semi's by beating some very average teams and go out in the semi's against the first serious team they come up against.
I do get the feeling that the players are in a better place mentally than in previous tournements. Am not sure about the rooney/vardy/kane combo though. That was awful in the last match. Hopefully we will just play 4 up front. I suppose it's good that it will have Russia second guessing though and unable to prepare fully for one or the other.