Well Done England!

Quite bizarre. Spain can shut up shop by retaining the ball. The Italians used to be masters of an aggressive defensive approach. We seem to think shutting up shop is getting everybody back (no out ball) but giving the opponents 5 yards of space and ceding 88% possession.
I never understood the hype. Tuchel took players prone to injury, players carrying injury, Henderson, forwards who got on for a couple of minutes, wide players who with a couple of exceptions are not wide players, omitted a couple of our best FBs, omitted Maguire who would have been an asset imo and Kane can go MIA as he did last night. A completely unbalanced squad with square pegs in round holes and a manager who promised not to replicate the approach in the last Euros and did just that. In the entire World Cup we played a couple of decent 45 minutes. That's it. Rant over. No doubt when we beat Latvia or whoever in the Euro qualifiers the media will be again bigging us up and 80000 muppets will pack Wembley singing 'It's Coming Home.' Grrrrrrrrrrrr.
 
herringthorpe said:
I think England the subs were firstly put on at the wrong time and secondly the wrong ones.

I agree with Lindum - McGuire was the obvious choice to take. Have to hold my hands up and say Bellingham played better than I have seen him previously.

Ivan bl**dy Toney . . .
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Henderson and Toney!? Gibbs-White must be fuming. Reece James looks like he learnt how to cross from Joe Powell and for me Dan Burns is not international quality. Tuchel clearly doesn't like Arnold but he adds a lot going forward. Of course, even before any analysis reports are digested the FA leap in to support Tuchel.
 
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England did about as well as predicted from the FIFA rankings - one of the few things that FIFA got right! Needed to play on top form last night or hope that Argentina imploded. Neither happened - no mystery.

There is still the 3rd place/"bronze medal" game to be played (Sat., k.o. 2200).
 
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Credit to the England players that took us to the Semi Final.
Credit also to the Argentina Manager on his substitutions especially the triple substitutions. They will have known the game was still there for Winning.
Defending ( Parking the Bus ) against a team like Argentina is asking for trouble.
Jordan Pickford and the goalpost saved it from being a 3 or 4-1 defeat.
Quality goal from us which shows what the players are capable of.
Euros next.
 
In poker terms, Tuchel went ‘all in’ on us being able to defend our penalty area for 25 or 30 minutes and not concede. That was what we had to do against Mexico with ten men and it worked, but Argentina are not Mexico. We were never going to hold out, particularly when we were giving the greatest player of all time his own football and space in which to operate and put in dangerous cross after dangerous cross. If they got one, they were always going to get another whether in normal time or extra time. At one nil up Argentina looked shaken. Our best hope was to try and get a second and it looked there for the taking. But we weren’t brave enough to back ourselves when push came to shove. When you finish a game against the world champions with Burn and Toney up front, Kane and Bellingham in midfield and Elliot Anderson at centre back you know it’s all gone horribly wrong.
 
The BBC said today that the FA would stick with Tuchel because they '...are pleased with the progress made.'
The 'progress' here can only be by comparison with what went before - that's what progress means - so Tuchel has made progress from Southgate. But England have reached at least the semi-final in 4 of the last 5 major tournaments. No real proof of progress there.
Against Argentina in the first half England had an Expected Goals total of 0.08 (France were slagged for having only 0.3 XG against Spain btw). That figure is the 2nd lowest XG for a first half at a World Cup in the last 60 years (only Costa Rica have ever had worse). Progress?
From England's goal in the 55th minute until Argentina's 2nd on 92 minutes England had only 12% possession. This was the lowest possession of any team at this World Cup over a similar time frame except Qatar during a period when they had been reduced to 9 players. Progress?
England's 5 shots were their lowest in any World Cup game in sixty years. Progress?
England have now lost seven straight World Cup games against a top 10 ranked team. Progress?
Last night was a shambles and Tuchel ought to resign. He's getting both barrels from opinion across the football world including from pundits who are invariably supportive of the England manager.
 
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I have watched World Cups since 1966 (not sure if the 1962 one was on TV?) not missing a televised game until this one where I only watched a few.
Radical as it sounds I begin to see merit in the old English view of non-participation and think UEFA ought seriously to think of pulling out of FIFA. Recent World Cups have been held in Qatar, Russia, Brazil and South Africa. This one was split between Mexico, Canada and USA with teams and fans racking up 1000s of miles of travel and (fans) spending a small fortune.
2030 - so far as I understand it - is likely to be expanded to 64 teams and played mainly in Morocco, Portugal and Spain but with some games taking place (perhaps I'm wrong here as it sounds crazy) in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.
Then in 2034 we're back to another great footballing nation like Qatar also in the Middle East - Saudi Arabia.
It's simply a circus and someone needs to say 'enough is enough'.
 
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