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Comments
4-2 .... Game on!
EDIT: oh dear too late ...
In terms of guts they had it all. And gave it all.
And Modric. What a fantastic player!
Well done France!
Didn't see the England game yesterday, had R5 on whilst stuck on the M25. Somewhat miserable afternoon.
I guess the hope now is that Southgate will build upon this and we will see a good outing at Euro 2020.
England would never have coped with France.
The reality is that France have won the World Cup TWICE and European Cup in the last 20 years. England doing cartwheels just for reaching their third ever Semi. Shows the huge gap that England have to bridge with Southgate at the helm.
The worry is that Southgate persists with the one-trick-pony that's the high energy game. Croatia found them out. And with the next WC in Quatar (2022, assuming England qualify), England MUST learn a different way of playing. Unless England develop a comfort on the ball and can slow the play down and play slow, and allow the ball to do the work, they will struggle in the heat of Quatar.
The French midfield has exactly what England are missing. Creativity. Kante and Pogba run the show in the middle and Griezmann can get up to support Giroud when they attack.
England have a lot of work to do to get to that level and go one further in winning a World Cup, what we saw in this one is encouraging but by no means the finished article. yet.
What the past month has demonstrated is that you can not eliminate human error from refereeing decisions, much still depends on individual officials' interpretations of the rules. Therefore the experiment should be abandoned.
I can't help feeling there is an agenda behind the introduction of var: tv companies are spending ever larger amounts of money on broadcasting rights and var stoppages represent an ideal opportunity to insert ad breaks during the course of games. The more spectactors accept var breaks as 'natural', the easier it will be to get them to accept ad breaks during the course of a game.
Players at big clubs surely know how to deal with pressure and expectation.. I think that excuse is a cop out to be honest. The real issue was that between 2004 and 2016 we had poor international managers, too many egos and a real lack of desire, I also suspect we had squads that just did not get on. Then there is luck.
Knock out football always hinges on 1 or two key moments in a match, when teams are close. There is no way that anyone can rightfully expect a team to even get to the semis, let alone win.
I think expectation is actually a fan issue. Oh this team is crap because they ought to get to semis and only reached last 16... is an attitude that is arrogant and fails to recognise that football at the top level is really close these days.
The right talent will come through, because it is already winning championships.
Even losing in the group stage to the only decent team worked out perfectly.
They're unlikely to get that lucky again.