Look, we're not remotely blessed with a lot of top class players at the moment. We have one genuinely top class player in Rooney but very few who would get in say the Netherlands, Spain or Holland team. Additionally, while there were 3 or 4 players like Lennon and Sturridge who could have been included in the sqaud and were probably unlucky not to have been, its not as if there are a lot of players sitting at home who would have genuinely made a messive difference to the starting 11. Equally, there are very few young players say in the U-21s who I can think of who could have been brought in to stregnthen the team
WE're also probably much stronger defensively with Hart, Terry, Cole and Parker than we are from an attacking perspective. We dont have the attacking players to play teams off the park and score 3 or more against a decent international team, we would do well to put 2 past a decent team. With these players most of our games will be probably 0-0, 1-0, 1-1, a few games might be 2-0 or 2-1....we wont be beating teams 3-2, 4-2, 4-3 etc or drawing 3-3
A team doesn't have to have great players to play attacking football... Blackpool had terrible players with a few average players mixed in and managed to be extremely entertaining in the PL against far better sides. Norwich this season played offensive football with Holt, Pilkington, Naughton and various other English players.
Roy has set his team out to contain and to yield possession. Norway doesn't have spectacular players and spent the majority of the second half camped outside our box, they didn't have to have world class players to do that. Belgium also played more entertaining football than us and if they hadn't been missing Kompany, they probably wouldn't have conceded the goal they did. (Kompany's replacement and Belgium's rb found themselves taken out of the game, leaving Vermaelen to try to get from LCB over to the RCB/RB area.)
But that Belgium team still dominated possession without being Germany, Spain or the Netherlands.
I think Roy picked far too many clowns: Kelly, Henderson, Downing, Walcott, etc. So I really don't agree with his squad, but my point is that the team he did pick is still capable of playing another way. It's not as if all 11 players in both matches were clowns. Looking at the starting lineup against Belgium: Welbeck, Young, Gerrard, Parker, AOC, Milner, Hart, Johnson, Cahill, Terry, Cole... That team is more than capable of playing attacking football, most of them do it with their clubs.
The decision to simultaneously flee to the edge of their box and to wait until teams get to our defensive third is the manager's decision, the players wouldn't retreat as a unit without the instruction to do so. But the only first half chances we did create were from doing the opposite, Welbeck spent a lot of the time chasing after 4 players without any support, but when Gerrard and Young hadn't completely retreated, Welbeck and Gerrard were able to dispossess a player in Belgium's half and got a goal for their troubles, the second time was someone closing down the Belgium GK, which is the last thing this England team is set out to do.
Capello's England was more entertaining than this.
Stuart Pearce's single England game against the Netherlands was at least more entertaining, despite Stuart Pearce not being anywhere near a World Class manager. (This is the guy that thought David James would make a good striker.)
Pearce used: Hart; Richards, Smalling, Cahill, Baines; Parker, Barry; A Johnson, Gerrard, Young; Welbeck.
So it's not as if England
has to be this boring or as defensive purely because our players don't know any other way.
