BenTheFox

Exactly. It's beyond laughable that anyone would try and suggest otherwise.

Sorry, but this is an incredibly shallow way of looking at it. One thing Southgate deserves a tremendous amount of credit for is moving on from experienced players of the failed regime. If Allardyce not had been involved in scandal, there is no doubt that the likes of Rooney, Hart and Cahill would have been involved for much longer. Allardyce admitted this himself. We desperately needed to move on from those players and clean the slate. Southgate did a respectable job of reinventing this team.

People always mention favourable draws as a stick to beat Southgate with. Have we forgotten how many times in the past that England have failed to beat teams that we 'should' be beating? We failed to qualify for Euro 2008 when we had the likes of Gerrard, Rooney, Lampard, Terry, Ferdinand, Ashley Cole, Joe Cole etc. In those qualifiers we drew against Macedonia and Israel, lost to Russia and lost both games against Croatia. 2010 World Cup we failed to beat USA or Algeria. Euro 2016 we failed to beat Russia or Slovakia and were knocked out by Iceland. Beating teams that we 'should' beat should never be taken for granted.

It certainly wasn't a smash and grab against Tunisia. Not in the sense that it was undeserved, anyway. We were miles the better side. Lingard missed four golden chances and their goalkeeper had an excellent game. They only scored because of a stupid and unnecessary foul by Walker for their penalty.

I can easily forgive that Croatia semi final. Their midfield was miles better than ours.

His approach wasn't actually that negative in 2018. It might say more about how bad we'd been previously but some of the football in that tournament was best we'd played in years.

Halfway through his tenure, the quality of players that he had at his disposal suddenly got much better. If you look at the starting line up against Croatia in the 2018 semi-final, our midfield was Henderson, Lingard and Dele Alli. No one wins a world cup with that.

You think he should have gone after the 2018 world cup? He got England to the semi-final and for the first time in years the team were some sort of cohesive plan at least. You can talk about the favourable draw but our squad in 2018 was bang average on the whole.

As much as I want England to win, I can't help but think that some people will deserve it if the next manager who is supposedly a massive upgrade comes in and completely stinks the place out.

Deserves a lot of credit, when he took over we'd just had the Iceland debacle as well as the embarrassment with Allardyce. There was a a feeling of pure apathy in the nation towards the national football team and he made us interested again and created the first ever likeable England squads in my lifetime. He's a limited manager and it's time to move on, but I'm glad that he was able to walk away on good terms.

Don't buy it, sorry. He's got a job where he's well paid, gets to work with the players daily, doesn't have quite the same pressure and scrutiny, he has goodwill and whether or not he's a success isn't defined by a tournament every two years when any manager can lose a one off game against inferior opposition. You say that his reputation would still be in tact if he fails, but Roy Hodgson was the butt of the joke until he proved everyone wrong at Palace. It feels like with England now the bar is win or trophy or you are considered a failure. It feels like a hiding to nothing. If he were to lose his job at Newcastle I think he'd take it, but I'd be truly astonished if he left Newcastle for it.

In what world does Eddie Howe leave Newcastle to manage England? With a few exceptions (Nagelsmann at Germany being one), top level managers aren't in international football. It's mostly washed up managers towards the end of their careers or people who have come through the international youth coaching setups.

Playing for Celtic at the end of your career is a pretty sweet deal to be fair. You're guaranteed trophies, you play in front of 50,000+ at home games, you still get to play in Europe (although only the group stages) and you play in one of the biggest derbies in world football.

I mean, he's not wrong, but I would probably keep my head down on this one if I was him.

What was also established this election is that the 65+ age group will vote conservative regardless. The main reason they gave for voting conservative this time out is that they always have. This is despite their handling of covid which obvioiusly begatively impacted older voters, as well as Sunak having left the D-day ceremony early. The tories can and should stop prioritising them because obviously many in that group are, let's say, leaving the electorate. If they don't try to appeal to younger voters, then they're finished.

It's really funny listening to right wing tories trying to explain why they lost so heavily. It was the 'Popular Conservatism' conference the other day and their only explanation is "we weren't right wing enough". They are doubling down on the idea that they should go hard on defeating 'wokery', massively reducing net migration and being a party of low tax and deregulation. Granted, immigration is a big issue for a lot of voters and people do want to see a reduction in net migration. That is one reason for their thumping defeat. However, here are things that they completely missed: There has been a huge downturn in the quality of public services and people's experiences with the NHS. Schools are crumbling, rivers are full of shit, trains are either always cancelled or don't turn up at all. Their conduct, particularly over the past five years. The lockdown parties, Boris Johnson promoting a known sexpest, having three Prime Minister in five months, Boris Johnson continually lying in parliament, PPE contracts etc. These things really got people's backs up. Liz Truss's minibudget. This sent people's mortgage rates through the roof and meant they lost so much of their core voter base. They dropped to being more than twenty points behind in the polls and never recovered from this. Also, Liz Truss's actions and her rhetoric around low taxes, deregulation and wanting to legalise franking was miles away from the 2019 manifesto that they were elected on. She had absolutely no mandate for it. Their 2019 was on paper a pretty big shift from what they had been offering previously. It promised 40 new hospitals, a a new green deal, HS2, state intervention and 'levelling up', essentially an end to austerity. This manifesto along with the promise to 'get Brexit done' gave them their biggest victory since Thatcher. There was campaigning around tax cuts or deregulation or anything like that. Most people would much rather have functioning public services than tax cuts. Their biggest problem in this respect is that they didn't deliver the things that people wanted in the manifesto. They're looking at votes they lost to Reform but over 70% of people that voted for Reform did so because of immigration, not because of promises to scrap net zero, conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum or tax cuts. The 2019 manifesto of being socially conservative but having more state intervention in terms of economics with levelling up, HS2, 40 new hospitals etc. but actually delivered and not with someone as morally bankrupt and unserious as Boris Johnson is the best chance they got of getting anywhere near government. They just can't bring themselves to recognise that.

I know where you're coming from. Imagine if someone can maintain that sense of togetherness whilst also being more tactically astute. I quite like Southgate for the reason that I feel more connected to the national team under him than I had done previously. Having said that if given the choice I'd have picked Keegan, Capello and even Hogson or Allardyce to have managed Leicester over Southgate. I think all them are actually better football managers (for the periods that they were relevant anyway) and had proven track records at club level but they all failed to get England playing as a cohesive unit (I accept Allardyce can't be dragged into that catergory).

Kane off was an obvious sub but was Foden? He was far and away our best player, particularly in the first half. Southgate would have been slaughtered for taking Foden off had we lost that.

Suck it up and give Southgate some credit on this occasion. He's rightly come under criticism this tournament but that was so much better. He's a limited manager, we all know that. However, He's built a team spirit and a togetherness that every other England manager has failed to do in my lifetime.

In fairness, the city of Leicester has a Conservative MP now for the first time in a long. However, that's because Webbe and Vaz are next level morons

Dignified speech from Sunak to be fair. Stark contrast from that classless and embarrassing display from Truss at her count earlier.

Labour received more votes in 2019, their worst result since 1935 than they have in this election, where they've won their second largest majority in history. It's actually crazy.

So...Next leader of the Conservative Party? I reckon they go with Kemi Badenoch. I think they will follow Reform to the right and they may consider Suella Braverman to have too much baggage.

Yeah, a very bad look.

It looks like the greens have won as many seats as Reform. Their success is not getting anywhere near the coverage that it deserves.