Quote Originally Posted by BIG H View Post
Sad fact is Lampard and Gerard suffer from 'John Barnes syndrome' they have never recreated their club form for England. Watching them week in week out in the EPL, you would think thet could make almost any starting 11 in the world, but for England they have played about 160 games between them and only had ahandful of really good performances each.

It's not like playing teams like Algeria means playing against better opposition than they face in the EPL, the EPL has some of the best players in the wordl

It's baffling!

Capello is too stubborn and pig headed! He needs to tell the players the team 4 or 5 days before the game so they can prepare as a 'Team' in training, he needs to accept that 4-4-2 doesn't work aswell!!







As for U.S.A - That is what I call commitment and team spirit. A pleasure to watch!!!

Yeah I agree with you Big H, it is baffling. WE have consistently underperformed for, well decades. Saying we are an average team, as if we just don't have the resources or talentpool to ever improve and that we are merely playing to our potential is absurd imo.

With the premier league we have, the clubs we have and domestic income we have we have absolutely no excuse not to have absolutely one of the best teams in the world. That we haven't screams of failure at some level, whether it's the FA, the toil of a packed domestic season, innapropriate choice of managers or whatever, the fact is that it is still not good enough.

I don't expect for use to be in contention to win the world cup, a look at our squad will show we fall behind the likes of Spain, Argentian and Brazil. But we absolutely should be on a parity with teams like Germany, Franch, Italy, The Netherlands etc in this tournament and certainly should be far too much for the likes of Algeria and Slovenia.

I'll give England a pass for the USA game, the USA team have performed very well in recent years and are a credible side. But not beating Algeria is an appalling result, it's like Man Utd drawing with Scunthorpe or something, it just shouldn't happen.

Still, we do have a habit of doing things the hard way and 'hopefully' we can rally and scrape past the Slovenians. I think we'll do it, most like with a free kick or an own goal 15 minutes from time, but we should make it.

Ironically if we finish runners up it may help us avoid Germany following their shock loss to Serbia, although Ghana will be no mugs either.

I reckon we will beat Slovenia, and then go through as runners up. Defeat Ghana, and then probably go out to Argentian in the quarters or something.