I know it’s ups and downs with international football and tournament form is another beast but the team wasn’t great against Malta either. Are the players just not that bothered? End of year playing in the motions?
Well these friendlies don’t mean much but it’s still a part of building team chemistry in the build up the Euros. The lack of creativity is still a key issue that has lingered since the Last Euros too, I think Maddisons badly missed and Sakas been far from his best.
When you have a team like that you need to be doing better than a 1-1. Southgate out!
Lol the idiots are really coming out after a meaningless game that ended 1-1
It’s the managers tactics.
Win some friendliesBreeze through qualificationDisappointing but ultimately meaningless pre-tournament losses <– you are here
Speculation as to whether it’s possible to replace Southgate before the tournament
Stick with Southgate
It’s coming home
Group stage has one impressive win, one routine win and one boring draw
Grind out knockout wins by 1 or 2 goals
It might actually be coming home
Play well against a top team, have a few horrible decisions go against us, crash out with a narrow loss
It will come home next time
Actually real and true
This is spot on except the horrible decisions part.
And the part about pre-tournament losses, since they didn’t lose.
We’re still bitter about the Lampard goal.
Yeah. We know.
Not sure about the grinding knockout wins? We put 4 on Ukraine and 3 on Senegal in the last two tournaments, Denmark and Colombia way back when have been the only grindy knockout wins with Southgate. You can legitimately criticize him without making stuff up.
People were saying the same thing before the Euros in 2021.
We got to the final.
We also looked awful prior to the World Cup then went and scored 6 in our first game.
Not sure what people were expecting from this game where there was nothing to play for. England players going through the motions and just hoping not to make a bad fuck-up or get injured or get a red card. I would do the same thing in their shoes.
I think it’s easy to look at a game like this and say it doesn’t matter but England don’t ever look convincing under Southgate.
I would disagree, we have very convincing performances. We deservedly beat Italy home and away this time round. It’s consistency we lack, for every good match there’s a 0-0 against the US around the corner.
One of the main problems of conversation around international football is it’s so spread out people have such short memories. We were very convincing against Italy and Scotland. We beat the same Macedonia side 7-0 in the home leg. But a couple of fairly dull games after we’ve already qualified and now the sky is falling again
Southgate is terrible
Hard to get motivated for a pub team when you’ve already qualified and you’re not getting paid for your time
England have great attacking players but a manager that plays it too safe.
Southgate is a man that was at the right place at the right time. Always get found out by tougher competition.
These games didn:t matter a jot and Southgate was experimenting, I wouldn’t read much into it. We deservedly beat Italy home and away and qualified with relative ease from one of the toughest groups. Aside from Portugal and France I’d say we were as convincing as anyone.
You can’t look much into these games it’s a dead rubber players don’t want to get injured or exert themselves to much when they are challenging for trophies, European spots etc. England qualified easily out in some really strong performances along the way. No team is gonna be at their creative best all the time all great teams have periods of grinding out results.
Say city qualify from their cl group with 2 games to spare then play out a few bore draws or scrappy 1-0 wins in the dead robbers nobody looks into it or cares do they ?
German here. Wanna swap?
Edit: actually, let’s go for a quick 24 hour war. After that we create the great British empire of German nations, combine teams and be unstoppable!