UEFA u21 Championships
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England U21: Steele, Clyne, Wisdom, Lees, Rose, Chalobah, McEachran, Zaha, Shelvey, Ince, Wickham. Subs: Butland, Smith, Caulker, Dawson, Henderson, Lowe, Redmond, Delfouneso, Sordell, Rudd.
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is wisdom ready to move into the centre for us ? would signing this young sporting guy not hamper wisdom's progression ?
Italy U21 equalise to avoid meeting the leaders of Group B.
Makes sense. Thanks. I'm not following this tournament at all.
Wisdom did well. Shelvey had his least worst game. The rest were dreadful. The big problem with Zaha is that although his body's quick his brain is incredibly slow, so his endless early-Ronaldo-style feints and stepovers nearly always ended up with him falling flat on his arse with the defenders strolling off with the ball.
Just got back from the game ... Great time ...
England had some great chances in the first half but were thoroughly outplayed in the 2nd half.
Wisdom - he looks comfotable at CB, and comes off as very classy, but he does seem a bit weak in the air. I felt they went after him aerially a few times, which is saying a lot considering Israel is a small team.
Shelvey - Disappointing. He moves well around the pitch, and makes the right decisions most of the time, but he really should be able to put a stamp on a game like this and he struggled. He needs a year on loan where he can play week in, week out and build up his confidence.
Henderson - It's obvious why there's a chance he'll take the next step as a player this year ... He has tremendous desire - the only player on the pitch after half time who tried to lead by example.
As for the other English players - I can tell why people love Zaha. Good pace, powerful shot and tricky but he was physically manhandled by the Israelis and did little. I don't think he can produce in the premier league if he doesn't bulk up a bit. Ince seems to have a similar problem and isn't really a winger.
As for Israel - their best player was Nir Biton, the 6'0" lanky centre mid. what sets him apart from his Israeli teammates is he actually seems to have a footy brain that works the whole 90 minutes ... He played well with City last year during their preseason and is now being heavily linked with Benifca.
Oh well ... great time ... fun to beat the English and good luck to Norway and Italy in the semis.
England had some great chances in the first half but were thoroughly outplayed in the 2nd half.
Wisdom - he looks comfotable at CB, and comes off as very classy, but he does seem a bit weak in the air. I felt they went after him aerially a few times, which is saying a lot considering Israel is a small team.
Shelvey - Disappointing. He moves well around the pitch, and makes the right decisions most of the time, but he really should be able to put a stamp on a game like this and he struggled. He needs a year on loan where he can play week in, week out and build up his confidence.
Henderson - It's obvious why there's a chance he'll take the next step as a player this year ... He has tremendous desire - the only player on the pitch after half time who tried to lead by example.
As for the other English players - I can tell why people love Zaha. Good pace, powerful shot and tricky but he was physically manhandled by the Israelis and did little. I don't think he can produce in the premier league if he doesn't bulk up a bit. Ince seems to have a similar problem and isn't really a winger.
As for Israel - their best player was Nir Biton, the 6'0" lanky centre mid. what sets him apart from his Israeli teammates is he actually seems to have a footy brain that works the whole 90 minutes ... He played well with City last year during their preseason and is now being heavily linked with Benifca.
Oh well ... great time ... fun to beat the English and good luck to Norway and Italy in the semis.
Love the mirror headline, "Defence like rabbis in headlights on Ofir Kriaf's winner as the host nation inflict third defeat in as many games"
Some photos:
Dre:
Some photos:
Dre:
This is the best article that's ever been penned about English football.
But England Were Never Any Good...
Everybody is queuing up to discuss the root cause of England's malaise at senior and Under-21 level but they're ignoring something massive: We were never any good.
Last Updated: 10/06/13 at 10:02 Post Comment
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England's Under-21 team got in some useful practice at being outplayed and eliminated early in a European tournament this weekend. It will surely stand them in good stead for when some of them play in the senior side.
As is de rigueur on such occasions, the English football cognoscenti of ex-managers, ex-players and journalists with little else to do at the moment, all went into full 'something must be done' hand-wringing mode about the poor performance of this England side, just as it had recently done about Roy Hodgson's team.
The problem with such post-England defeat blarting is that so much of it is based on the idea that England were once really good and that the past was somehow better than the present. This has always happened but it's never been true.
It's no use Graham Taylor saying: "I think we have all seen this coming. We have got this tremendous amount of money that has now come into football. It means the top four or five clubs are not looking for the best players in England, but the best players in the world because they can afford to buy them."
Ah yes because when this wasn't the case, such as when you, Graham Taylor, were England manager, England were still no better than just alright and often downright poor. You won nothing, you were never near winning anything, yet you had an entire league of Englishmen to choose from.
Equally, it's no use FA honcho David Bernstein saying there is a 'desperate' need to increase the amount of English players in the Premier League. In the 1970s, when the only foreign imports into our leagues came from Scotland or Wales or the Irelands, England failed to qualify for anything for 12 years. Lack of players to choose from might look like the problem but any cursory knowledge of history proves it is otherwise.
It's no use Sol Campbell, another England stalwart who never came close to winning anything internationally, saying:
"With the Under-21s and football in general in England I honestly feel that the quality has gone down."
Gone down compared to when, Sol? Because when you played ten times for the U-21s between 1994 and 1996, you didn't even qualify for the tournament. At least this current crop managed to do that.
But there's the problem, the past is always better than the present, isn't it? Time and again we hear players talking about what it was like 'in my day' as though their day had delivered anything other than the same degree of failure.
It's no use Phil Neville, a man of great international pedigree but absolutely never near ever winning anything with England, saying: "My biggest learning was between 18 and 21. I don't see the lads now getting the chance until they are 21, so they've missed out on three years' football. The biggest thing is to get the players playing regularly."
This might sound eminently sensible, except that when this wasn't the case, when most sides were full of Englishmen of all ages, England were still either just alright or pretty poor. Phil isn't stupid, he must know this, so why is he saying it?
I know I'm repeating myself here but it needs to be asserted loud and often that we have not fallen from the lofty peak of yesteryear. We've not gone backwards due to English kids being excluded or slowed down by overseas talent; by and large we've remained in the same bracket of quality and achievement throughout every post-war era.
But to the ex-pro or the old journo it seems the past was always a better time. In their day England were world beaters. Don't you remember that? Back when it wasn't now.
Here's the truth: England has never been a very good football team for more than the occasional game both pre and post-1966. Our World Cup victory can be seen as a nothing but a short six-game blip in a long history of mediocrity and we even needed a dodgy goal to win that.
All the ex-pros have no solutions to offer because they were part of the problem too. They might want to project their time as somehow superior but they all lost. They all left the stadiums of the world with heads down, a defeat in their guts. And yet they always seem to think they've spotted where we are going wrong, just as when they were players, ex-pros knew where they were going wrong. Everyone has always known where we're going wrong, but still, we go wrong. This must obviously be because they don't really know anything and they never have.
People have always wanted to know who is to blame for England. Variously across the decades it's been the English manager, the foreign manager, the coaching, the pitches, the tactics, the weather, the foreigners, injuries, fitness, our schools, our kids, our parents, our popular culture, our drink culture. Everything has had a finger pointed in its direction.
But the fact is, while our culture, society and our football has changed a lot in the last 60 years and all the scapegoats have been addressed in one way or another, England's results haven't really changed much. While other countries have periods of success and dominance, England never does. We're resolutely unexceptional. Not really bad, never really good.
It is this fact that undermines every single critic who points to any changes in modern football as the problem. Only if England had ever been truly great could we point to changes from those halcyon days as the reasons for our fall from grace. To hear ex-managers and ex-players complaining that things ain't what they used to be requires a total mind wipe and the construction of an alternate reality where Carlton Palmer held the World Cup aloft and Phil Neville didn't clumsily hack Viorel Moldovan down to concede a tournament-eliminating penalty.
Maybe the only thing that hasn't been addressed over the years is what a negative influence ex-players and managers have on the England team with their misguided, deluded attitudes about England and what it expects. The demands on England players are great even though they have almost nothing to live up to.
In an interview this weekend, Tom Ince, who played an underwhelming game for the U21s against Norway, said this of his father, Paul, an England player with plenty of commitment to the cause and who never came close to winning anything internationally: "If I had a bad game he would be spitting in my face and worse than that!"
Presumably, this was back in the day when spitting in a child's face was universally recognised as a positive motivation tool. Dig underneath that disturbing and unhygienic statement and maybe we can begin to find the psychological root cause of England's problem. But maybe that's too hard to do, much better to retreat into blind nostalgia for the good old days, the good old days which never were.
Typically considered comments from Pearce. What a total fucking twat. Always hated him, he just gets more laughable.
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