England 2 – 2 Czech Republic
Well the press have certainly started to whinge about Capello, well they would as thats all they do. Although I think hes making a bit of an arse of the job so far he is an excellent coach and its going to take him a while to get any sort of shine on the turds hes picking.
Lets look at the stats first. Czech Republic 8th in the World, England 14th. So from that stat alone a draw was a good result for us. If you even think about saying we are better than them, no we are not, if we were our ranking wouldnt be so piss poor would it now. So for a start if the fans stop thinking that we should be winning these games comfortably and gain a bit of perspective then perhaps they wouldn’t feel the need to boo the team just because we aren’t winning 8-0 at Wembly.
This should have been Beckhams last start for England. He is without doubt still one of the best dead ball players around. But unless the rules change to allow a player to come on to take a free kick or corner he has no role to play anymore. Embarrassingly slow at times.
Lampard and Gerrard, really do we still have to talk about this? Yes! Unfortunately its obvious to everyone bar an England manager and Frank Lampard that Gerrard is the better player and should be played in the center as an attacking midfielder. We actually have 2 players who can play on the left wing, Joe Cole and Stewart Downing, yes I know Downing isn’t a world beater but he sticks to the left, can pass and if he cant cross well all the time he does at least know where the damm left side of the pitch is. For the right Bently should have been starting and Lennon is a definite candidate, but there are plenty of others who could play on that side, hell even Gerrard has played there with some success for Liverpool. Despite Capellos protestations Gerrard was seemingly playing on the left and coming into the centre a lot, with a fit Joe Cole why on earth put Gerrard there? Ashely Cole can come forward but we will get stuffed on the counter by the good teams if he plays too far forward all the time to cover the left.
If your playing Gerrard as the creative midfielder why do you need Rooney doing the same damm thing seemingly? We need goals and better constructed ones at that. Rooney is practically a defensive midfielder at times, maddness for a striker. We have plenty of creative options in Gerrard, Cole and Bently, if hes going to play he needs to play as a striker. Hes not Marco Van Basten good, lets get that straight. Hes playing far too deep and not scoring or setting much up.
Wes Brown is not a better option than Johnson and certainly not as good as Micah Richards. If Richards doesn’t get back into the senior team now then we are going to suffer badly.
Finally Terry as Captain, well as a defender he had a fairly pants game and was made to look inadequate by Baros. As for Captain, he barely seemed in control of the defense let alone adding anything to the team as a whole. So why is he Captain again?
Can someone please give Capello a DVD player and copies of all of England’s games for the last five years. Because it seems he hasn’t bothered to review old footage to see for himself what we already know doesn’t work. He is trying to get us to play a more possesion game up front rather than a hoof, but we still seem to get panicky and resort to the hoof.