Friday, June 16, 2006

Football Post 5

Start relatively poorly and win. Allow standards to slip a bit and win better. Played two, won two, goals conceded nil. Fantastic.

Brief cameos of brilliance:
  • Lennon will be terrifying full-backs. As a second-half substitute he was magnificent.
  • In a two minute second half spell Beckham, by now playing wing-back, ran right back into his own half to make a covering tackle, jinked a wondeful little pass outside a defender but inside the touchline to Lennon and then put across a perfect ball for Crouch to nod home.
  • Gerrard's goal.
  • Terry was not going to concede a goal.

We may yet stumble in the knockout stage but everything is still fine.

2 comments:

Jonathan Potts said...

It's the best start w can hope for, really. Two wins - most important thing. But the fact that we looked shaky during those two wins will cause the team to dig in hard rather than get complacent - which can only be a good thing.

Anyway, Brazil, France and Germany have all had shaky starts (especially France). So the cup's still anyone's (well, anyone who's not already out of course).

Chris said...

If you believe the press then England are rubbish and should have been knocked out. This is complete garbage. England have actually played quite well. Perhaps we should have scored more goals (e.g. Lampard should have had a couple last night), but overall we've actually done alright.

I was so very glad Rooney didn't change the game much last night. It was Lennon that changed the game. We would have scored even if Rooney didn't come on, although it was probably good for him that he got 30 minutes to run around in a match situation. Pity he didn't get a chance to have a decent effort on goal.

The teams we play later in the tournament (probably starting with Sweden) should make more of an effort attacking us, instead of sitting back and being fairly organised in defense. This will make for a different game and I hope England's perceived performance may be better. We may have to do more defending ourselves and it will be interesting to see how we hold up against a better attack.

I'm happy with England's performances so far.

The press are idiots.