13.5 million supposedly watched it
June 28, 2010 Leave a comment
Reports suggest that 13.5 million of us tuned in to what England crash out of the World cup with what was the heaviest defeat that England had ever suffered during a world cup.
To many of us it was predicted that things were not right in the England camp before the Germany game and things climaxed to a pathetic performance by some truly gifted footballers. The 4-1 defeat was sour to taste when you think that it was our arch rivals Germany that were the team to send our boys back on to the plane and home.
We started over two weeks ago with much hope anticipation, and with 5 minutes in to the first game, i am certain your hopes and enthusiasm for a possible long campaign were present. But from the moment Robert Green spilt the ball in to the back of his net, things looked ominous for the tournament and campaign.
Drawing to the USA was followed by a truly tragic and hopeless display against Algeria.
The players looked like boys that had been dragged by their mothers shopping against their request. The heart and passion that the fans show was not replicated on the pitch, evident in Wayne Rooney.
The player that many had pinned their hopes on did not perform in this tournament. After playing so well 4 years ago in the world cup in Germany, we have watched him mature in to a gifted player when playing for Manchester United. But this World Cup the striker had a very under-whelming campaign. He looked so unhappy playing in the tournament. Admittedly after picking up an ankle injury playing for Manchester United against Bayern Munich, he has not been able to recapture his form but the performances during South Africa were horribly below his best. But it leaves us asking why?
Why did Capello stick with 4-4-2? Why did he not try 4-5-1? Why did the players perform so poorly? Why could the players get themselves in to such a poor position that we ended up leaving the tournament so early?
Some of you may say that they got as far as they could go, but many would looks at the route they could have taken, they could have faced a Ghana team in the last 16, where they could have built upon that result, and faced Uruguay, where you would like to think that a poor England side could beat them, and it would have left us possibly in the Semi-Finals. We were given the group we wanted, we had the path to the Semi-finals where we would have met some of the big teams, but we failed, we faltered and we didnt achieve our potential
The golden boys did not make it, are the new youth going to? is there any youth coming through? why is it when we get the opportunity we seem to fall short? where is England going?