So ... Who could England have beaten???

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Billydinho
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by Billydinho »

When I see Conor Wickham in the paper buying a £17,500 bottle of Champagne, I realise just how bad an impact the Premier League has had on our national development.

I'm never one to complain about people's wealth, but Conor Wickham is nowhere near international class but has this sort of money to throw around.

He probably hasn't even got 17 premier league goals to his name.

It's all a mess.
bobcar
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by bobcar »

QuintonNimoy wrote: I don't think we have earned the right to assume we could have beaten anybody, even Honduras would probably have forced a draw.
Any team in the competition could beat any other team in the competition, that's the way world football is now.

If the group was played again we may well come out on top, it won't be and we have to live with that but the knee jerking on here is incredible. With a little bit of luck we could have won the group but that wouldn't have made us any better as a team just that things went our way, we are not the worst team in the world because we lost and we would not have been the best team in the world if we won.

It's all about what happens on the day, the better the team the better the chance of winning but there are no guarantees. In a one of game anyone can win, look at our 3-1 over Chelski.
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by anjado »

QuintonNimoy wrote:It doesn't take long for the "positive" re-assessments to start kicking in, and to think we blame the press for inflating expectations.

We were dire, if Costa Rica had needed to win to go through in the last match we probably would have lost to them as well.

I don't think we have earned the right to assume we could have beaten anybody, even Honduras would probably have forced a draw.
Dire in what sense we created pretty clear cut chances and reduced the opposition to fewer shots than us. Uruguay and Italy were just more clinical than us all of our games were fairly even and we were let down by costly defensive lapses against Italy and Uruguay and were punished both times. You and others make it sound like the opposition were battering us for the whole 90 minutes every game.

If people want to know why England failed there is a pretty good statistic. Only France and Belgium from the teams who advanced into the second round are in the bottom 16 teams for tackles made in the tournament. England were 29th in terms of tackles made which is probably where we failed. England also had the 10th best pass completion rate in the tournament suggesting our passing wasn't really that bad especially in the first 2 games.
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by beckton »

QuintonNimoy wrote:It doesn't take long for the "positive" re-assessments to start kicking in, and to think we blame the press for inflating expectations.



I just see people offering a more balanced realistic view that is all. In doing that I haven't read anyone inflating expectations, quite the contrary.
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by QuintonNimoy »

beckton wrote:I just see people offering a more balanced realistic view that is all. In doing that I haven't read anyone inflating expectations, quite the contrary.
Yet apparently we could have won the group but for some insignificant slice of luck. You know, the one where it turns out your players can both defend and score goals. That bit of luck.

We got exactly what we deserved, no more, no less. This is the England team, not one that magically takes the chances it misses or doesn't make stupid defensive mistakes. The one we've got misses it's chances and does make stupid mistakes.

It's a long road back, we'd better hope these world beating kids start fulfilling their potential.
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by Toulouse_Iron »

vietnammer wrote:
That's a lot of waffle meaning Thank **** Algeria have gone out so I can get a good night's sleep and not have to hear their crappy Rai music again and again :lol: :
Bugger. I thought I'd got away with it....
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beckton
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by beckton »

QuintonNimoy wrote: Yet apparently we could have won the group but for some insignificant slice of luck.


Yep, that's football, fine margins.

The consensus before the World Cup began was that England went into it with low expectations, probably the lowest in our history. And I still don't get where now anyone is ''inflating expectations'' by offering some balance.
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by QuintonNimoy »

beckton wrote:Yep, that's football, fine margins.

The consensus before the World Cup began was that England went into it with low expectations, probably the lowest in our history. And I still don't get where now anyone is ''inflating expectations'' by offering some balance.
It's not luck, it's kicking the football in the wrong direction, and luck and fine margins aren't the same thing.

I consider talking up our total failure as mere bad lack, or identifying fine margins as 'the reason' as if these margins don't reflect a real and genuine difference in quality and is if they are easy bridge, as the beginning of the cycle of deciding we have a chance of winning the Euros. This will come around in due course.

Just because we expected to do badly doesn't mean pretending we had a chance of beating Italy or Uruguay, even having witnessed our failure to do so, is already being excessively optimistic about the future - it certainly can't be relevant to any past that actually happened can it?
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beckton
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by beckton »

You're suggesting people have said things that they haven't and lost me.
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by bobcar »

QuintonNimoy wrote: It's not luck, it's kicking the football in the wrong direction, and luck and fine margins aren't the same thing.
So Cardiff beating Man City early in the season was nothing due to chance and if they played the same match again under the same conditions it would be the same result? There is a lot of luck in football, that's what makes it so exiting otherwise you might as well award the trophy at the start of the season and not bother playing any matches.
I consider talking up our total failure as mere bad lack, or identifying fine margins as 'the reason' as if these margins don't reflect a real and genuine difference in quality and is if they are easy bridge, as the beginning of the cycle of deciding we have a chance of winning the Euros. This will come around in due course.
No one is suggesting we are world beaters, we are not. What we are saying is that on a different day we could easily have qualified from the group , it just wasn't our day.
Just because we expected to do badly doesn't mean pretending we had a chance of beating Italy or Uruguay, even having witnessed our failure to do so, is already being excessively optimistic about the future - it certainly can't be relevant to any past that actually happened can it?
By you rationale Cardiff had no chance of beating Man City but they did. We are much closer to Italy than Cardiff are to City, I might even argue we are slightly better than Italy though that of course is open to argument, that we had a chance of beating them is not, we did have a chance.
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by WHUJohn »

AndyCarrollsBarber wrote:Why would you go overseas when you could stay in the uk, sit on the subs bench and earn 3x more than you would in a European league. The prem is the best paying league, and that's a big problem. All comes back to hunger and desire, which a lot of young English players (and mercenary overseas players) are sadly lacking.
Completely agree.

Nail on the head.
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by Hambrosia Stu »

This whole world cup has been about fine margins. Part of the reason it's been so compelling.
Like the Swiss hitting the Argy post, the ball bouncing out, hitting the Swiss bloke on the leg, and trickling the wrong side of the post, in the last minute of the game....
A lot of games have been decided by moments like that.

Sure, it's generally been the case that the better team has come out on top, but often only by the finest of margins. And sure, chances are had that gone in for the Swiss they'd have lost anyway

With England, you could point to a moment like Suarez's second (the goal that effectively knocked us out). His legs buckled, he just about regained composure, and buried the finish. Had his leg given way, we'd have probably got a draw, and then the Costa Rica game takes an entirely different perspective. I'm sure if we'd needed a win to go through (as we would have if we'd drawn one of the first 2 games) we'd have seen a very different England performance in that last group game

Again, I'm not saying we deserved anything more than we got, or that if we'd got that point we'd have beaten Costa Rica and gone through. Nor am I implying that such fine lines are papering over the very obvious cracks we have. But I do think a lot of waffle has been spouted about us coming bottom of the group, as though that automatically equates to us being one of the worst sides in the tournament. When the truth is that with a bit more luck, one or two incidents in 2 games of football going our way, it may have been a quite different story

That's not saying we were anything other than bang average. But, the point remains, as bobcar has mentioned, that we weren't that far away from getting something from our 1st 2 games, and on a different day may well have got a result against either of those 2
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by QuintonNimoy »

bobcar wrote:So Cardiff beating Man City early in the season was nothing due to chance and if they played the same match again under the same conditions it would be the same result?
Man City did not play to their potential while Cardiff quite clearly did, and that's not about luck. It may be about mindset, motivation, willingness to work and specifically about some tactical problems Cardiff were able to pose but it's not about being lucky or unlucky, unless you count Man City not really turning up lucky for Cardiff.

That England might have to rely on their opponents not turning up and therefore making it "their day" and being "lucky" isn't something that England can hang their hat on. If everyone else in the tournament played **** we'd have a chance of winning? I don't really call that a sober assessment.
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by QuintonNimoy »

beckton wrote:You're suggesting people have said things that they haven't and lost me.
What I'm suggesting is the uncritical nature of the assessments are the fertile ground on which wild expectations will take root. Essentially I'm calling for more doom and gloom.
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by bobcar »

QuintonNimoy wrote: That England might have to rely on their opponents not turning up and therefore making it "their day" and being "lucky" isn't something that England can hang their hat on. If everyone else in the tournament played **** we'd have a chance of winning? I don't really call that a sober assessment.
You said England could not beat Italy or Uruguay, now you've suggested a mechanism whereby they could. My position that you disagreed with was that any team in the finals could beat any other team just that better teams were more likely to win, glad to see you've come around even if we do disagree on the comparative levels of teams.
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by QuintonNimoy »

bobcar wrote:You said England could not beat Italy or Uruguay, now you've suggested a mechanism whereby they could. My position that you disagreed with was that any team in the finals could beat any other team just that better teams were more likely to win, glad to see you've come around even if we do disagree on the comparative levels of teams.
Stop trying to be a smart arse. England couldn't have won either match because all of the combined factors that go into them meant they were second best as proven by the final results. No one suggested team performance remains static, but at the World Cup in the actual games on the particular day England failed. It doesn't matter if they might not have on another day, they weren't playing any other games on those days. Being able to get the maximum performance out of yourselves at a World Cup is what makes the difference for a lot of teams.

All you're doing it pointing out another way in which England failed, but not accepting it for what it is. It's a failure to perform to the maximum when it counts, or put another way we choked. Personally I'm not sure our quality was high enough to say that, I think we just have crap players but positing a fantasy performance and using it as a basis to say we could have done better is a nonsense. We did what we did.

When I say Honduras could have drawn with us, I'm thinking of how they played. I'm not sure I saw much difference between them and us. South Korea were probably bad enough for us to beat them. Those opinions are based on what I saw of how those teams did on the day. No pretend days required.
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by Toulouse_Iron »

The key is in the question: Who could England have beaten? NOT who would England have beaten? A subtle difference but important nevertheless.
Looking at the 2 matches that actually mattered, a point from either wouldn't have been undeserved. We were not hopelessly outclassed. Both games we went 1-0 down and clawed our way back to 1-1. Had we won either of those 2 games, nobody would have said it was daylight robbery.
We all know what actually happened but I think we could have won either of our first 2 matches. Only a very small handfull of teams have been impressive enough for me to think we would have little chance of beating them: France, Holland, Colombia, Algeria, Chile maybe one or two more. The rest would not worry me too much.
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by richneal »

I saw all three of Iran's matches, and I honestly think we could've done them. I would've certainly been confident enough of victory to put some hard-earned on it.
Not sure about any other teams - too close to call. Would not be confident of putting my money where my mouth is.
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by westham,eggyandchips »

Not that they mean a great deal, I'll be intrested to see the FIFA rankings after the WC........England should not be anywhere near the top 20. :(
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Re: So ... Who could England have beaten???

Post by bobcar »

QuintonNimoy wrote: Stop trying to be a smart arse
Thank you, that just confirmed I'm right and you know it.
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