Slovakia V England Match Thread

[Webbo]

1 minute ago, Steve_Walsh5 said:

To be fair you never saw anything wrong with England's performances in the Euro's.

 

It's commendable of you that you blindly stick by the players & the team. But I genuinely think you must be watching a completely different game to 99% of everyone else. 

I said it was a shit game, doesn't mean I have to agree with crap conspiracy theories.

[pleatout]

Just watching the highlights in ITV.  Seems Robbie Fowler & Ally McCoist think that if the ball comes off a defender then Walcott was on side.  Sorry but Walcott was offside when Sturridge controlled it 1st time and then again on his 2nd touch.  Never mind the 3rd touch that " the ref cant have seen, ha ha ha".

 

A player is judged to be on or offside when a member of his own team plays the ball.  The line about defenders was removed about 25 years ago.

[dylanlegend]

As others have said the main purpose peep are annoyed is cos Drinky and Vardy didn't play. Same with me, however, it wouldn't have made much difference especially with us having so much possession.

 

The thing that annoys me the most however is that if Vardy had signed for Arsenal in the summer he'd have started tonight as would Drinky if he'd have signed for Spurs. 

[Miquel The Work Geordie]

****ING WANK

[Donut]

We completely dominated the game from start to finish which was to be expected, but yet still looking for positives we can hang onto going forwards and I cant think of too many.

 

 

[RastaDog]

Game changed when Skrtel decided to be a twonk. What the hell was he thinking?

 

To be fair to England, from that point on they never looked like loosing and compressed the game. Slovakia, I think, panicked and decided that packing the defence and 'hanging on' was the tactic. Nearly worked. I can see why Vardy (esp) wasn't called on, there was next to no space for him to play his game. And Drinkwater was equally not needed because of the game being played in the final third. Me, I'm kind of selfish that the both of them weren't used and so couldn't pick up injuries.

 

I'm surprised more by Slovakia's implosion than anything. They looked comfortable until the sending off. 

[Mark 'expert' Lawrenson]

Shortage of players to pick from is the problem facing any England manager, I'd be hard pressed to think of any other players worthy of selection, I'm by no means defending the performance but who else should be in the squad?  

We won despite the dull uninspiring performance, the frustration comes from Vardy and Drinky not getting a game, until we get more English players playing in the Prem nothing will change.

[Steven]

8 hours ago, Miquel The Work Geordie said:

****ING WANK

Not as good as either of those two things.

[KFS]

I've noticed that urgency always ramps up at the end of the game. It's like we're arrogant enough to believe that we'll always make a break through and score. England managers are so obsessed with tactically analysing the shit out of the team that we play this regimented, turgid rubbish to stay in the game in the hope of a late winner. That gets you through the group stages/ qualifiers, but the tactics need to change in knockout scenarios; which as we saw in the summer- they don't. 

[HighPeakFox]

Just seen Allardyce essentially admit he's not up to the job - Rooney gets to do what he wants because 'he has more international experience than me'

 

I thought the idea of a manager was to instruct, personally, rather than just cave in. 

[linemakers]

13 hours ago, buzzer_b said:

Hey fair play to him though. He got the result so he's happy. 

But it masks a really bad performance with players having no idea. Played the same way as with Roy. Only Linalla looked any good

[Buzzell]

1 hour ago, linemakers said:

But it masks a really bad performance with players having no idea. Played the same way as with Roy. Only Linalla looked any good

I was being sarcastic. Yeah it's great we got off to a win but that sort of performance was shocking especially against ten men. Just shows how shit we really are. 

 

Expect another shit and disappointed World Cup campaign from us if we carry on with performances like that. 

[Manwell Pablo]

Dunno what you're all moaning about. When all said is done that's the hardest fixture in the group (bar maybe a trip to Scotland) negotiated with a 3 point return and we while we left it late we deserved to win. 

 

Yes it was garbage to watch, yes that game has confirmed that we are yet again probably going to manage early knockout stages in Russia after scraping the group again because very little has changed, but I dunno what we are expecting really, aside from Drinkwater and Vardy starting which for me would of made very little difference. We just do not have the players at the moment.   

[Dan]

1 hour ago, Manwell Pablo said:

Dunno what you're all moaning about. When all said is done that's the hardest fixture in the group (bar maybe a trip to Scotland) negotiated with a 3 point return and we while we left it late we deserved to win. 

 

Yes it was garbage to watch, yes that game has confirmed that we are yet again probably going to manage early knockout stages in Russia after scraping the group again because very little has changed, but I dunno what we are expecting really, aside from Drinkwater and Vardy starting which for me would of made very little difference. We just do not have the players at the moment.   

Said it yourself.

[Manwell Pablo]

Just now, Dan LCFC said:

Said it yourself.

 

Well I don't really see what anybody can do about that . If you honestly think the inclusion of Drinkwater and Vardy is going to enable us to compete with the world elite I think you vastly over rate the effectiveness they'd have in that team. 

[Dan]

Just now, Manwell Pablo said:

 

Well I don't really see what anybody can do about that . If you honestly think the inclusion of Drinkwater and Vardy is going to enable us to compete with the world elite I think you vastly over rate the effectiveness they'd have in that team. 

I don't think that the inclusion of those two is going to ultimately yield trophies. I just think their exclusion (Drinkwater's in-particular) points to a bigger issue that is going to be more of a hindrance for us in the long-run. No-one in the world will convince me if those two played for Man City or Tottenham that they would get as little time as they do. That for me is the bigger issue.

[RUDZY]

Could of done with someone getting on the end of the many wasted corners.

Having said that a WIN is a WIN.

Good luck to Sam for the future.

[Manwell Pablo]

1 minute ago, Dan LCFC said:

I don't think that the inclusion of those two is going to ultimately yield trophies. I just think their exclusion (Drinkwater's in-particular) points to a bigger issue that is going to be more of a hindrance for us in the long-run. No-one in the world will convince me if those two played for Man City or Tottenham that they would get as little time as they do. That for me is the bigger issue.

 

It's annoying but, but a much smaller issue compared to the lack of grass roots coaches and the amount of players we produce with genuine top talent, secondary issue then being those that have it turn into utter tossers and tend to get worse as they get older and get into what many would consider their prime instead of better. I don't think there is anything I could conceivably think of that would make this team much better in the short term, we should be happy if we qualify with ease and who knows maybe we can awful our way through a tournament ala Portugal. I would like to think one thing Sam does manage to sort out is our ability to defend as a unit. 

[Livid]

Not so much Big Sam's revolution as revulsion for me.

 

Theo f'in Walcott FFS!!

 

I'm getting a little tired of hearing the Vardy can't play because of a lack of space line.

 

Granted he scores a lot of goals on the break away, buts that's due to the way the city play and making the most of his pace. He just doesn't appear that one dimensional to me, the goal against Villa at home, the header at Southampton, the 10 in a row goal at Newcastle and his finish from Mahrez's ball against Chelsea. If you give him the service he will put it away. Honestly he couldn't have done any worse than Kane yesterday.

 

 

[Captain...]

6 hours ago, HighPeakFox said:

Just seen Allardyce essentially admit he's not up to the job - Rooney gets to do what he wants because 'he has more international experience than me'

 

I thought the idea of a manager was to instruct, personally, rather than just cave in. 

 

Really strange comments from Big Sam, Rooney was all over the place and not in a good way, we were pushing for a goal late on and our top international goal scorer is pissing about around the half way line.  Cahill and Rose and Walker were all further forwards. Just bizarre. On paper it looked like a balanced 4231, but with Rooney going AWOL all the time we had no shape.

 

Then to say he is just going to let Rooney do what he wants!!! How can you even prepare tactically when you have no control over what your captain does, I know the free role is a thing, but...

 

...I don't know, until that comment I wasn't too disheartened. It wasn't a great performance but Sam has had very little time with his players it will take time to change from Roy's regime of mediocrity and at least they were pushing to the end, got the goal and actually looked like they gave a shit when it went in.

[PhillippaT]

IMHO, what England could really do with, (along with a manager to do it), is take a friendly match as an opportunity to really experiment and play the B-if not C-team and see how it goes - looking at other individual players. How much do you learn from just playing the same team of players over and over again if they struggle to get the job done?

[Manwell Pablo]

5 minutes ago, PhillippaT said:

IMHO, what England could really do with, (along with a manager to do it), is take a friendly match as an opportunity to really experiment and play the B-if not C-team and see how it goes - looking at other individual players. How much do you learn from just playing the same team of players over and over again if they struggle to get the job done?

 

Friendlies aren't meaningless though. It is important to win a good amount as they count towards world ranking.

[Captain...]

14 minutes ago, PhillippaT said:

IMHO, what England could really do with, (along with a manager to do it), is take a friendly match as an opportunity to really experiment and play the B-if not C-team and see how it goes - looking at other individual players. How much do you learn from just playing the same team of players over and over again if they struggle to get the job done?

You can do that when you have  a solid plan A, at the moment we don't know how to get the best out of our established players, that is the priority before you start experimenting in friendlies.

[PhillippaT]

12 minutes ago, Captain... said:

You can do that when you have  a solid plan A, at the moment we don't know enough about our established players to start experimenting in friendlies.

If the Euro's+1 hasn't been enough to do that, then why bother?  The best time to do this is precisely after a major tournament as you slowly build up to the next one - to get as much information about all the players you have available in the run up to such a competition - especially when you have an easy! group of countries to play against.  As I said, the only thing in Big Sam's favour is that he hadn't had any time to arrange a friendly or two before the match, so...  If they don't arrange a friendly or two before the next one, and he doesn't start to look at any other players at his disposal, I definitely start to doubt his character and judgement as much as I did those before him - as I've said, before, MADNESS!

 

According to the schedule we're not playing an international friendly until after the next three qualifiers, and even then it's against Spain!   I guess things arn't going to improve much, then?

[Captain...]

1 minute ago, PhillippaT said:

If the Euro's+1 hasn't been enough to do that, then why bother?  The best time to do this is precisely after a major tournament as you slowly build up to the next one - to get as much information about all the players you have available in the run up to such a competition - especially when you have an easy! group of countries to play against.  As I said, the only thing in Big Sam's favour is that he hadn't had any time to arrange a friendly or two before the match, so...  If they don't arrange a friendly or two before the next one, and he doesn't start to look at any other players at his disposal, I definitely start to doubt his character and judgement as much as I did those before him - as I've said, before, MADNESS!

He actually had the option of a friendly before the Slovakia game and turned it down to concentrate on training with the squad.

 

Friendlies are largely overrated as ways to learn about your squad, you can do a lot more experimentation in training where you can control the parameters and stop  the game to get your ideas across. A friendly is a chance to apply the training to a game situation but it is against teams playing at bout 70% and also trying a few things so it doesn't give the best indication of how it would translate to a real game. We beat France and Germany in friendlies before the Euros, but we were terrible.

 

I get your point, but until we can get a functioning first 11, making lots of changes for friendlies will not make much difference.