World Cup 2018 | 11th July | SF: Croatia vs England Match Thread, KO 19:00 (BST)

I'd say better than expected but lost to the first decent team. ;-)

At least the squad can get better, which you couldn't really say about them after a couple of recent World Cups.
I think this needs to be viewed as a 5 year cycle with Southgate. I’ve been impressed by him and for the first time in many years I actually like the team and even the Rags have contributed to that. I think GS is brave to try to play possession football and work through the field but clearly it’s going to take some time and the team needs to fine tune their mentality.
First half was good today. The game was there for us then but we missed the chances and lacked the midfield passing to create more. Second half their tactical changes worked really well and we were not able to react- if you want to play possession based you have to be brave enough to keep the ball and also get it back quicker, because our midfield limitations were shown up the game often became attack v defence and I have to say I thought Stones and Walker were excellent.
However with that amount of probing and switching of angles chances will come and so they did for the Croatians.
John was culpable for the goal- the danger instinct which I thought he had really improved during this tournament deserted him. It will always be something of s balance with him but if he takes the commanding England form into this season he will be a
colossal player.
Interesting to see Mandzukic did very little all game yet twice appeared in the 6 yard box and almost had 2. That’s one of the areas we lack in that we don’t create those types of chances often enough.
And for Southgated system to work we need a couple of good instinctive passers in the midfield but don’t know where they are.
 
To be fair to Croatia they got it right second half. Nullify Sterling and England have nothing.
Although his distribution was woeful Henderson I thought was good (I hate him) he had nobody within 5-10 yards of him to pass to other than than our defenders. Lingaard and Alli is this generations Lampard and Gerrard. Rashford you can see has some talent but he's nowhere near ready, his in game intelligence and positioning is awful and he always plays with his head down.

Southgate has to take this as his substitutions were too late and mind-bogglingly like for like (reminded me of Pellers). You could see we needed Delph or Loftus-Cheek for Alli or Lingard within 10mins of that second half. He'll hopefully learn from it though.

All in all, proud of them. Nobody expected us to get this far at the start of the tournament.

tend to agree - no creativity in the midfield - not being club biased by Rashford and Lingard are not international class and out of their depth ( though Rashford is young enough to develop) and an over reliance on the set piece meant in reality that was as much a team Allardyce would have picked and set up as anyone else.
 
He might score a lot of goals for us but I suspect we'd score less as a team.
Possibly true
I think against Sweden and Columbia he was great winning fee kicks relieving pressure etc

He’s s goal scorer and not much else but good at what he does

Sometimes we miss that part killing teams off
 
I am just re-watching Kane's chance, with Pep's Barca, Bayern and us now it is always pass in order to achieve the highest possibility utility. Did not realise at that moment that Raheem was completely open and clear of Croatian defenders.
 
I would like to have seen Southgate substitute Vardy in for Kane. Yes I know Kane is the superior player overall, but I didn't rate him at all today.

Maybe Vardy could have given the team the spark they needed in the second half. Vardy reminds me of Carlos in how his goal is for the team to win and fck all will stop him from achieving that goal. Sometimes you need a little grit on the pitch.
 
tend to agree - no creativity in the midfield - not being club biased by Rashford and Lingard are not international class and out of their depth ( though Rashford is young enough to develop) and an over reliance on the set piece meant in reality that was as much a team Allardyce would have picked and set up as anyone else.

I think lingaard did great
Not best player in world but willing to give what he has
RashFord is too reliant on his o pace and need to up his overall game. Think mourinho has held him back
Bags of potential though
Young I feel is not comfortable on the ball at all and out of depth but again playing shit football weeke in week out hasn’t helped him
 
tend to agree - no creativity in the midfield - not being club biased by Rashford and Lingard are not international class and out of their depth ( though Rashford is young enough to develop) and an over reliance on the set piece meant in reality that was as much a team Allardyce would have picked and set up as anyone else.

We wouldn't have set-up anything like that under Allardyce.

If we're over reliant on set pieces it's because we don't take our chances from open play.

It happened against Tunisia and it happened again tonight.
 
I think lingaard did great
Not best player in world but willing to give what he has
RashFord is too reliant on his o pace and need to up his overall game. Think mourinho has held him back
Bags of potential though
Young I feel is not comfortable on the ball at all and out of depth but again playing shit football weeke in week out hasn’t helped him
Did you watch the game in the pub with a load of rags?
 

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