We all know the talent pool England have is very shallow, so the players that get in to the team should come as no surprise.
We all know the talent pool England have is very shallow, so the players that get in to the team should come as no surprise.
The Euro's and the last seasons PL just proved that talent and reputation doesn't mean shit at the moment.
Near enough anyone can hoof their way deep into a competition as long as they're set up right. Sam will do that much at least.
Last edited by Kano; 04-09-2016 at 09:25 PM.
This is because the entire focus has shifted to not losing. As Arsenal fans we know too well how utterly pointless possession of a football can be. And technically the levels have fallen to such a degree it's debatable you can even call this a professional team any more. Most of these players can't kick a ball. Consider this. Theo Walcott was the most technical player on that pitch when he came on. He stood out a mile from the other turds. And he's no good.Originally Posted by Power_n_Glory
What we see here is a pub team stuffed with players who could never make it in a top league, hyped beyond the bounds of credibility by a media that has a vested interest in keeping up the pretence that English football is top tier. Gerrard and Lampard may not have been our favourites but they had 10x the ability of the likes of Henderson or Sterling or the laughable Alli. We hated them because they never did enough to win, but that's nowhere near as hateful as sacrificing everything to avoid losing.
I don't have the words to adequately describe how ludicrous the whole thing is. After the game we had the clips of Alli fucking up every single move he was involved in, while the pundits literally recounted the opposite of what we could see with our own eyes. Then they concurred this fuck up player who has been elevated simply because he is English (like Walcott), should form the heart of the team in tandem with you-know-who, because under it all they know full well there aren't any talented English players any more. So they have to invent them.
Then we had the customary serenade for shrek, a player who has had one half decent game in his entire career at international level and one good season and two semi-decent seasons at club level. In other words, a very, very ordinary player notable in one respect, he had a lot of stamina as a kid. Oh and he scored that goal against us. Yet this old has-been/ never-was continues to span the generations with his stench. Why? Because he's the great English media icon and he gets paid a lot of money to be such a mythical figure. So it doesn't matter in English football circles if Alli and Rooney are nothing players with close on zero talent, because this only gets highlighted to a bewildered public once every two years when the national team is humiliated, often by "minnows" who have a fraction of the footballing history and resources. That leaves plenty of hype time in between - the money must flow.
We don't like Owen either. 5x as good as any English striker around today. We didn't like Lineker. 10x better. Or Keegan, 20x better. The standard of football has collapsed inversely to the rate money has come into it. So much money has now come in that there's no standard at all. Not in this country anyway. In the short term it's just too unprofitable to lose, so the long term is chucked in the bin. And that's what we've seen over the decades since England could compete, short term hype and a failure to do what the Germans did when their football hit the buffers - rebuild and take the pain until the long term plan unfolded. The English media doesn't have the patience for it, too much cashing in to be done on the immediate hype.
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That same Lampard and Gerrard team failed to qualify for the Euros. It's not just because the focus has shifted either. That team string passes together no matter how hard they tried.
Didn't that team get to 2 World Cup Quarter Finals?
We have zero chance of getting anywhere near that these days.
Those were the days, getting to the quarter-finals.
Why didn't we like Owen? He was great when he first came on the scene, hamstring injuries and a move to RM put paid to his career.
I think it's because he's a pillock.
That, and the cup final.
NOTE: The location of this post has been moved and the thread title (which was previously Wenger is Leaving) has been manipulated by a notorious pro-Wenger moderator. What was previously a message that contained no profanity and made a comment on a real life event has now been manipulated by a deliberately provocative title. An old and crude propaganda and censorship technique.
A lot of players are, but I judge them on footballing terms. You can't hate a guy for being able to put a ball into the net putting so much spin on it that it goes out of reach of the keeper.
We have a chance. Look at the Euros. Portugal have a very average team. Wales are average. On paper, we had a solid team but it comes down to bad management. I think it was during the World Cup in the first half against Italy, we were playing the best attacking football I’ve seen from England. Quick rapid attacks and it came from us playing Sterling behind the striker. Roy, like the idiot he is, decided to play Rooney in the middle and switch it from the second half and we looked a totally different team. We need a manager to make some hard decisions about selection because we’re not that far off technically.
Kane, Vardy, Sturridge, Welbeck, Rashford all are pretty decent front options. Germany, Portugal, Wales and Spain don’t have that sort of striker option. Our midfield isn’t that bad either. It’s weaker than our rivals but we’d be far worse off if we had a Lampard and Gerrard situation. Neither player distributed the ball well for their clubs and were lucky to have foreign partners next to them to ease that burden. We really struggled to play the ball to feet and would end up knocking the ball long to Peter Crouch or we had the days where we knocking it long to Heskey for him to nod it down to Owen. It was a piss poor long ball football.
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