Euro Qualifiers 13th & 17th October **Spoilers**

C64 said:
The tactic was lob high balls in to owen from what i was seeing the only player that played well was sol campbell the rest were panicky and dire.
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Tell me when that hasn't been our tactic. For the life of me I can never understand why Owen isn't more vocal at his team mates for doing it for the last 8 years+

Our so called world class midfielder have either been bypassed by the defence lobbing one forward or the creative geniuses we have in midfield do it.

Rarely it works and the opposition manager is heralded as a tactical genius, when the reality is england are going to play that same way. Especially when they get tired.
 
McLaren was clearly so worried that he played an aerial game, launching balls from deep for Owen and Rooney to collect. It worked once all game and thankfully we scored. However England have never been a good aerial team, so it was never going to continually work. It was absolutely clueless in terms of tactics and McLaren should hang his head in shame.

As for the midfield, it's been a long time since I've seen an individual performance as that given from either Gerrard, SWP or Cole. Take your pick for the worst... I'd be pushing to give any of them 2 out of 10.

4 tall, aerial CB's to try and score from set-pieces was clearly the game, obviously it wouldn't work as you need your CB's to defend, not attack.

If we'd tried playing it on the floor we'd have been okay, because other than the last 30 minutes they were actually almost as bad as us.
 
Loki said:
The stakes are high and it was a disappointing result but upto the equalizer then I thought it was a very competent performance. My only criticism was that I thought J Cole really looked like a central midfielder being asked to play on the wing rather than a natural left side midfielder. He looked very uncomfortable
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Well said Loki, apart from a crazy 10 mins we played pretty well. It was always going to be difficult to get anything in Russia and if we don't go through it won't be because of todays performance but because of dropped points earlier on in the group.
 
rooney wasn't crap, him and owen don't look too bad to be honest. i wouldn't have minded phil neville in the squad today. didn't really rate richards or lescott too much on todays performances. they almost seemed to get in the way of campbell or ferdinand. robinson didn't make a howler but he didn't pull anything out of the bag for us either. gerrard is a more complete player than lampard but i'd have brought him off for lampard after the second goal. wright phillips looked alright but lacked a bit of quality for his final ball and i didn't really see much of joe cole when the going got tough.

bit of a bummer really.
 
I didn't think Cole was that bad, seemed he was at least trying to get it down and play, he just had no-one doing the same around him. Having said that, I agree with the rest of it but you can add Rio, Richards, Rooney and Lescott to the dire performance list in the 2nd half.
 
BaZ87 said:
Well said Loki, apart from a crazy 10 mins we played pretty well. It was always going to be difficult to get anything in Russia and if we don't go through it won't be because of todays performance but because of dropped points earlier on in the group.
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nah we played a game where we invited them onto us. i see united doing it away in europe quite a bit and i hate it.
 
I thought Ferdinand was one of the decent ones. Block after block from him and Campbell. Richards and Lescott looked like CB's playing as Wing-Backs... odd that...
God McLaren is such a moron.
 
Caught the last 15 minutes, great.
Why isn't Agbonlahor in the squad, he was great for the U21s last night and looks much better than Downing:confused:
 
Gilly said:
I didn't think Cole was that bad, seemed he was at least trying to get it down and play, he just had no-one doing the same around him. Having said that, I agree with the rest of it but you can add Rio, Richards, Rooney and Lescott to the dire performance list in the 2nd half.
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He can get it down and play but he should have been doing it out on the left, it was his wandering that meant Rooney had to be tracking back to cover for him for the penalty.

I disagree about Lescott too, for the majority of the game he played well and along with Campbell he kept covering up for every time Russia got in down our right.
DanH84 said:
nah we played a game where we invited them onto us. i see united doing it away in europe quite a bit and i hate it.
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You have to put it into context with who we're playing. Not many sides get anything in Russia and you can't go all out and try and batter them because they will punish you.
 
JohnnyG said:
Caught the last 15 minutes, great.
Why isn't Agbonlahor in the squad, he was great for the U21s last night and looks much better than Downing:confused:
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there are a couple of villa players i'd be tempted to give a go at the moment to be honest. good width, pace and positional discipline and some quick clever delivery into the box as well.
 
What a strange game, around 60 mins I was thinking what are England trying to do, what are the tactics, they just seemed to push up 5+ and let the Russians attack, defence wise shocking after 60 mins, McLaren should have made a change then.

If we fail to qualify and its not even in our hands then what a few months of the summer will be.

I always said Mclaren was not the right man, even posted a thread here.
 
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