World Cup 2014

[Master]

Suarez the cunt.

[Beanz]

Suarez the cunt.

Him and Gerrard. If we go out tonight it will be a Liverpool players fault, either way. Cunts.

[Beanz]

Suarez the cunt.

Him and Gerrard. If we go out tonight it will be a Liverpool players fault, either way. Cunts.

Twats

[Kirkland Laing]

Suarez the cunt.

Him and Gerrard. If we go out tonight it will be a Liverpool players fault, either way. Cunts.

You've got to cut them some slack. Those two and three others of the England team were just part of the biggest late season collapse in the history of professional sports. They've been crushed psychologically and may never recover from a momentous debacle like that.

[Kirkland Laing]

I'd like to say well done to the Team America All-Star soccerball team who were amazingly close to a famous victory over South American opposition but a Portuguese player knotted the game with an overtime headkick.

[Kirkland Laing]

England's problem isn't that they're scared of playing for the team or scared of the press reaction or whatever. Try dealing with the Brazilian or Spanish sports press if you think our press is bad. England's problem is that they can't make three passes without giving the ball away.

International football. You either need to tiki taka dominate possession or you need to be able to move the ball at great speed from player to player on the counterattack, the current tiki taka antidote.

England can't do either of these things because our players have fundamentally shit technique compared to foreigners.

Although he now looks like Uncle Fester Ray Wilkins was once a supremely gifted footballer. Captain of Chelsea at 19 and could play the ball better than Hoddle. One thing every Englishman knew was that Wilkins was amazingly gifted at passing the ball. Wilkins thought the same thing until he went to AC Milan and found that even the teenage trainees had better technique than him.

They used to have a training game where one guy went on the middle of the other players who were in a circle and passed the ball to each other. The guy in the middle would try and intercept it and the guy he intercepted it from then went in the middle. Wilkins spent almost all his time in the middle.

And we haven't got any better. Go abroad and you see pitches split in five crossways and five four versus four or five a side games going on instead of twenty two tiny kids playing on a full size pitch watching the ball soar over their heads all game. Foreign kids learn how to pass and controil the ball. English kids don't.

We breed payers who are big lads who can run all day and that's great for our end to end domestic league but shit for international football. And with the number of English players in the top league getting less every year the national team are going to get worse and worse.

[ryanman]

England's problem isn't that they're scared of playing for the team or scared of the press reaction or whatever. Try dealing with the Brazilian or Spanish sports press if you think our press is bad. England's problem is that they can't make three passes without giving the ball away.

International football. You either need to tiki taka dominate possession or you need to be able to move the ball at great speed from player to player on the counterattack, the current tiki taka antidote.

England can't do either of these things because our players have fundamentally shit technique compared to foreigners.

Although he now looks like Uncle Fester Ray Wilkins was once a supremely gifted footballer. Captain of Chelsea at 19 and could play the ball better than Hoddle. One thing every Englishman knew was that Wilkins was amazingly gifted at passing the ball. Wilkins thought the same thing until he went to AC Milan and found that even the teenage trainees had better technique than him.

They used to have a training game where one guy went on the middle of the other players who were in a circle and passed the ball to each other. The guy in the middle would try and intercept it and the guy he intercepted it from then went in the middle. Wilkins spent almost all his time in the middle.

And we haven't got any better. Go abroad and you see pitches split in five crossways and five four versus four or five a side games going on instead of twenty two tiny kids playing on a full size pitch watching the ball soar over their heads all game. Foreign kids learn how to pass and controil the ball. English kids don't.

We breed payers who are big lads who can run all day and that's great for our end to end domestic league but shit for international football. And with the number of English players in the top league getting less every year the national team are going to get worse and worse.

That has been one problem in the past yeah. But at this tournament England had an 87% pass success rate vs Italy (the highest of any team in the first round of matches) and 82% vs Uruguay.
So on this occasion the reasons lay elsewhere.
This time I don't think there is a deeper reason to be uncovered other than we played two good teams in tight matches which could have gone either way but we ended up on wrong side 2 out of 2 (which isn't exactly a statistical improbability).
Of course though, if we were better, had better players, had a better style, then those matches wouldn't be 50/50 calls (or 60/40 or whatever) so the lack of English players at top clubs and the style of play in the EPL are issues.

[Master]

England do not have enough quality players or any world class players. The ones that are decent are over paid spoilt brats. Every world cup since 1982 I build my hopes and this is the same result again.

1990 was the best team we ever had since class 66.

[Kirkland Laing]

England's problem isn't that they're scared of playing for the team or scared of the press reaction or whatever. Try dealing with the Brazilian or Spanish sports press if you think our press is bad. England's problem is that they can't make three passes without giving the ball away.

International football. You either need to tiki taka dominate possession or you need to be able to move the ball at great speed from player to player on the counterattack, the current tiki taka antidote.

England can't do either of these things because our players have fundamentally shit technique compared to foreigners.

Although he now looks like Uncle Fester Ray Wilkins was once a supremely gifted footballer. Captain of Chelsea at 19 and could play the ball better than Hoddle. One thing every Englishman knew was that Wilkins was amazingly gifted at passing the ball. Wilkins thought the same thing until he went to AC Milan and found that even the teenage trainees had better technique than him.

They used to have a training game where one guy went on the middle of the other players who were in a circle and passed the ball to each other. The guy in the middle would try and intercept it and the guy he intercepted it from then went in the middle. Wilkins spent almost all his time in the middle.

And we haven't got any better. Go abroad and you see pitches split in five crossways and five four versus four or five a side games going on instead of twenty two tiny kids playing on a full size pitch watching the ball soar over their heads all game. Foreign kids learn how to pass and controil the ball. English kids don't.

We breed payers who are big lads who can run all day and that's great for our end to end domestic league but shit for international football. And with the number of English players in the top league getting less every year the national team are going to get worse and worse.

That has been one problem in the past yeah. But at this tournament England had an 87% pass success rate vs Italy (the highest of any team in the first round of matches) and 82% vs Uruguay.
So on this occasion the reasons lay elsewhere.
This time I don't think there is a deeper reason to be uncovered other than we played two good teams in tight matches which could have gone either way but we ended up on wrong side 2 out of 2 (which isn't exactly a statistical improbability).
Of course though, if we were better, had better players, had a better style, then those matches wouldn't be 50/50 calls (or 60/40 or whatever) so the lack of English players at top clubs and the style of play in the EPL are issues.

Those possession numbers are the exceptions that prove the rule I think. Italy are no great shakes in this tournament, they managed to lose to Costa Rica (population 5 million) and we lost to Uruguay (pop 3 million). All three teams are finishing below Costa Rica.

Against higher level competition, last 16/last 8 level, England can't keep the ball for more than a few passes and don't have the solid technique throughout the team to be able to move the ball from front to back at high speed on the counter attack and create chances. In all these tournaments as soon as we come up against a decent team we always lose. Always. This time we didn't even get to the decent team stage.