saintant

Simon Jordan talking absolute sense and looking pissed off at the fact that Jim White was clearly trying to get him to wade in against Tonda.

After we scored we should have kept two wingers high up the pitch and Kane at centre forward with Bellingham as the link to give Argentina reason to fear a counter attack. Rice and Anderson protecting plus the back four in place was a better bet than 11 back and booting the ball knowing it's coming straight back at us. With 11 back we didn't even defend sensibly which was demonstrated by the fact that Argentina still had acres of space down both flanks to enable them to put dangerous crosses in. Again we didn't defend those crosses with 5'9" MacAllister winning numerous headers in the centre of goal. All the while Messi was patrolling and pulling the strings. Quite simply England scored then turned into headless chickens and played the remainder of the game exactly how Argentina would have wanted.

England clearly had no structured plan on how to manage the game after going one nil up. As a collective the team automatically retreated and all took up defensive duties to try to preserve the one goal lead. It's such a senseless thing to do because we just handed the whole initiative to Argentina and they didn't have to worry about defending themselves. It is baffling how so-called elite footballers can believe this is a tactic that will work. Spain didn't do it against France, they just carried on doing what had given them the lead and ended up scoring another.

Joe Hart praising the Argentina manager for his use of subs 🙂 Come on, England went full on defensive so why wouldn't he just bring on extra forwards and midfielders? It wasn't rocket science Joe!

Someone shut Micah Richards up.

Think Spain will beat Argentina.

Yeah, too much fear. All eleven decided they were going to defend and we weren't brave enough to keep players in their normal positions and give us options to relieve the pressure or even score another goal because the Argies obviously had to throw caution to the wind and would have left gaps - with nobody forward you have no chance of exploiting these gaps.

We'll likely finish 4th which is about right for this team.

Let's face it, this team wouldn't have beaten Spain in the final.

You're mental mate.

Unfortunately when the Argies went behind they decided to start playing football and were deserved winners.

Bring on Burns.

It's down to how much we want it now.

This all day and leads to a goal. Surprise surprise.

You definitely are 🙂