England v San Marino

[yxee]

Only negative for me was Walker, missing passes and poor deliveries. Throw Jenkinson in the next squad please!

 

[Pavilionaire]

I honestly think I've never seen such a lack of desire from a team to score. 5-0 down and they take off their lone forward. What IS the point of San Marino? Even the Faroes with a population of 48,000 gave it a go against the Swedes before losing 2-1.

 

[Kumquat]

Thought Carrick and Walker were awful. Cleverly has a lot to learn too. But overall no leadership and the number of missed passes and lack of brains was so frustrating. Poyet would have been going mental if that was us. On the plus side , thought Baines was excellent both decision making wise and technically and Shelvey clearly looks the part and has taken to the Brendan Rodgers regime. Welbeck grew into the game I thought and think he has the confidence.

 

[perseus]

I turned on the TV in a very brief purple patch for England.

San Marino were coached very well. England tried to work their way through like Albion failed against Ipswich. Then Carroll came for the alternative of overpowering San Marino in the West Ham way. Then it went wrong as England would need to get around on the wings and cross.

Par result, not more and no less than expected.

I noted the very well taken goals, the ones that went wide for the Albion. So wide they did not even come close. I keep coming back to the clinical strike by Matt Sparrow against Southampton and the goals of Elliott Bennett.

 

[Pavilionaire]

I feel a bit sorry for Adam Johnson. This game was crying out for a winger who looks everytime to skin the full- back. I like Lennon but he's lost his winger's mojo.

 

[bn1&bn3 Albion]

I had some plastic United fan who moaned all game 2 rows behind me, some yanks who kept calling it soccer right behind me and then the band.... Why do I keep going to England games...

 

[Deleted member 18477]

Only negative for me was Walker, missing passes and poor deliveries. Throw Jenkinson in the next squad please!

I actually cannot believe its the same player after watching him last season! He's improved so much! Awful last season... This season... Bacary who? Expect Sagna to be sold after his little outburst about arsenals transfer policy.

 

[krakatoa]

So some people really did have nothing better to do on a friday night than watch that 'match' from start to finish? Oh dear.

 

[CHAPPERS]

Wow. Walker was f***ing AWFUL and Carrick again showed why, even with his supposed excellent range of passing, he will never be an England regular.

Shelvey has looked good in every game I've seen him in this season and I hope he gets a run soon, could be a very good player.

 

[CHAPPERS]

What exactly does the FA intend to coach at its £105m Snazzadrome? | Football | The Guardian

It has – yet again – been a peculiar week to follow the England football team. At least it has for anyone who has yet to lobotomise fully from their medium-term memory the recent bad times, chiefly the final hour of the most recent tournament appearance, against Italy in Kiev, when England looked not just ragged, but strangely traumatised, the players trotting about wearing the crumpled, stoic expressions of men who have been taken hostage and forced to perform some ritual task of abasement for the cameras: baffled, fearful, but still somehow hearteningly game and willing, like a group of dogs coerced, aggressively, into trying to play chess.

This time, however, things are different. England entered the current double-header buoyed by images of St George's Park, the Football Association's centre of alleged excellence, which is apparently poised to change the apparent culture of elite English football apparently for good, at least if we are to believe the breathless pre-failure publicity of its inauguration this week.

Is it just me? Looking from one to the other – the retreat from Kiev, faces smudged with ancestral confusion; to the Jacuzzis of Burton-on-Trent, the scented brochures of project-delivery – it is still hard to see how one actually speaks to the other. Other than perhaps, as a grand scale example of structural dissonance, of organisational wish-fulfilment, perhaps, even, of bullshit.

Sorry. I know people have been very nice about all this so far. They've been nice because the FA has good intentions and is also limited by circumstance to scuttling about on the periphery, like a mother in law at Christmas fussicking impotently over the sprouts. But the fact remains, as a cure for English football's ingrained ills the Snazzadrome at St George's brings to mind a fat man deciding to lose weight by buying himself a really expensive tracksuit.

It is as though the FA has decided to learn to speak fluent Italian by drinking a very small cup of coffee, wearing its sunglasses on the top of its head and driving around on a moped late at night shouting. It is a basic confusion of cause and effect, an apparently genuine conviction that what has been holding England back all these years is the failure to build its own luxury hotel, a lack of fancy exercise bikes and above all the absence of an altitude chamber capable of mimicking the two-yearly surprise – the outrage – of foreign-style weather.

There is an almost endearing degree of literal-mindedness to what is largely a process of styling. Because, in isolation, there is no obvious causal link between English football's new country pile and the prospect of teenage footballers being coached more effectively around the country. The FA has tried to hurl a grappling hook across the divide. At St George's Park we will coach the coaches, sending them out pre-evangelised, rolling their eyes and hurling their arms out, ready to spread the gospel of whatever-it-is through bolted doors, over padlocked academy gates, in through the youth club keyhole.

At which point it becomes necessary to ask the real question: what exactly are they going to be coaching up there anyway? Because, £105m spend notwithstanding, this is what is missing. It is still the great, gaping, unanswered question of post-war English football: a sense – beyond the commendable how-to of current FA coaching manuals – of what the English style, the English vision, is going to be. There is a Spanish style. There is a Dutch style. In Lviv this summer Joachim Löw discoursed with some brio on his philosophy of a new German game of sprints, a kind of bleep-test-football based around short bursts of motion. A little pretentious, perhaps a little incoherent, but this kind of talk is necessary. It offers an armature around which systems can be stretched, it feeds the imagination and it becomes even seductively self-fulfilling.

By contrast 60 years on from the FA's first attempts to whittle out some kind of post street-football form of coaching and playing, the only coherent methodology English game has produced is the garden-shed bad science of direct football, a movement that, in Brian Glanville's words, "poisoned the wells for a generation". And so the FA knows what it doesn't want. It doesn't want men on park touchlines shouting "send it", albeit these days men don't really shout "send it" any more. They shout "sustain!" and "use the space" or even "calm! CALM! CALM!", which is good advice and shows they've been keeping up and listening to Ruud Gullit's stool-bound ruminations on Champions League nights, but does tend to make everybody feel quite tense.

In this same spirit the FA's approach seems to have been simply to copy whatever is working elsewhere. First France's Clarefontaine Academy, when that was the thing. And now apparently Barcelona, albeit this is currently restricted to occasional swooning reminders that many of the high-tech machines present are also "used by Lionel Messi" – as though the FA genuinely believes Barcelona have evolved into an ideologically driven regional super-club because they have very fancy machines, a bit like convincing yourself if you could just get hold of one of those robot voice boxes and a wheelchair then you might finally start to understand astrophysics.

Beyond which there is no real vision, no holy text, no castle in the sky. Perhaps the FA would have been better off spending its cash on bribing the planning inspectorate to obstruct the sale of playing fields while paying Johan Cruyff, Gary Neville, Arsène Wenger, Glenn Hoddle and the ghost of Jimmy Hogan to spend a long vacation shacked up in the basement of a derelict chateau imbibing opiates, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and producing on a stack of parchment a manifesto detailing once and for all exactly what English-style football is supposed to look like from here on in.

Instead the FA chairman David Bernstein spoke, hopefully, of "an Oxbridge of football", at which point you could almost hear the tuts, glimpse the covert wanker signs, the rolled eyes, the sense of how much English football hates this kind of talk. And so we have hydraulic treadmills and a world-class banqueting suite and an Oxbridge of football for people who will remain ill-qualified to go to an Oxbridge of football: an Oxbridge in isolation while all around it the sands stretch away, patrolled by the FA's own distant platoons of prosthelytising converts, rapping at the shuttered city gates with their pamphlets, their medium to long term good intentions.

Perhaps it would have been better if the FA lets up on all the development talk and simply said: We have built ourselves a fancy HQ with a luxury hotel, partly in the hope players will no longer see us as cobwebbed second-raters by comparison with their clubs (who will, let's face it, always have the first and last word in the wrangle of competing interests over academies and coaching). For now at least this England team can get on with presenting itself to the world, laid out in its splendid new-build sarcophagus, shaved and barbered, newly suited, eyes glazed with entropic reverie.

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

Walker has been shite all season, I dont think Redknapp's attitude towards him last year, played him with a broken toe and while shattered, Confidence is shot.

I really dont get the Media hype of Ox, He is an OK player at the moment, was pretty poor last night but yet gets 8's etc in ratings?