Well, that was a disaster yesterday wasn’t it?
I’m not really sure ‘gutted’ quite covers it though. There I was before the game, up on my soapbox again, putting the country to rights for not getting behind the lads. I know we hadn’t convinced anyone in the group stages but I’d maintained that isn’t unusual for us and we’d come good if the support was there.
Not that even I had ridiculously high expectations for our campaign, I just wanted the players to give a good account of themselves – not much to ask you’d think? But you’d be wrong because giving a good account of themselves was beyond our players it seems. I’m not going to sit here and slag them off though – I don’t doubt there’s thousands out there only too happy to do that anyway. I’m just accepting that as a national team, we’re way off good enough right now.
Who do we blame as a nation though – the players who manage to turn it on every week for their clubs but can’t translate that internationally? Or the manager everyone seemed to have such high expectations of when he came into post? Well, everyone except me it seemed at the time.
Certainly you’d think the Premier League’s top English players are selling us short when their club and country form are absolute poles apart but then again, the circumstances they play in are vastly different. They don’t have the same players around them for a start, so that’s bound to effect their game but every team out there will be subject to that, so how come everyone else learns to deal with differing resources and our players don’t?
Maybe it just makes it harder when they’re not all played in their best positions, not to mention not even knowing they’ll be on the field until 5 minutes before they get on the bus. I mean seriously, what did Capello ever think he’d achieve with that sort of tactic in the World Cup? If he thought it’d ‘keep them on their toes’ he couldn’t have been more wrong because it just isn’t possible to psych yourself up and get your head ready for games as big as these in that sort of time.
I just didn’t get Capello from the start anyway, while everyone else seemed to be singing his praises for his ‘brave’ decisions, I wasn’t buying it because where England were concerned, he was completely detached. Think about it though, it wasn’t just because we’d got another foreign manager but he’d also never managed in England. In short, he had no affinity with the country whatsoever. To me, that’s the impression anyone watching England yesterday would have got from the majority of our players as well – with the exception of the spell after Frank Lampard’s goal had been disallowed, there was no passion. Yes, individually they might well have been focused on what they saw as their own games but collectively they were about as together as the Coles.
And going back to the goals, you’d have thought Capello would have had more than enough ammunition to get the lads keyed up at half-time but unless he said “just spend all your time in their area, don’t worry about counterattacks and don’t wear yourselves out chasing back”, then whatever he said wasn’t translated on the pitch. And maybe that is what he said because Frank Lampard was quite right in his view of it later when he said that after the ‘goal’, ultimately it was their focus on getting the ‘equaliser’ that caught England out.
It was soul destroying for a supporter to watch and whilst I really want Capello out of there, on some level the players need to have a look at themselves as well. Then again, I’ve no doubt the post mortem in the press will help them do that!
