I prefer to watch Northern Ireland, yes. Who Wouldn't? A team full of league 1 and 2 players who bleed for their country. They're a team full of proper passionate lads, not like the little princesses who play for England.
None of those players you mention were world class. A world class player would walk into any team in the world. The last one we had was Ashley Cole. Cahill is barely third tier international class and a weak link. Alli certainly has potential. So the best forwards in the game who score at a rate of 1 a game are wingers. Not all forwards are of a certain types. Typical Neanderthal English view and one of the many reasons our football is stuck in the Middle Ages.
not necessarily. Bale has struggled to get into the Real side at times. Lampard & Gerrard for example were certainly in the top 5 Central Midfielders for the whole planet.
Neither were as good as Xavi or Iniesta the two players who were genuinely world class in that position. You’d have a better argument using Paul Scholes as an example. The only one since Gaza to reach those heights. A world class player can make a poor team win things as well as looking good in a good team. Maradona for example or Ronaldo who got an awful side to a final before succumbing to injury. Bale has other world class players at Real. Again all of which are better than Kane.
I think you've hit upon the problem right there. That sentence sums up perfectly what's gone wrong with football, and why lots of us don't watch it at that level any more.
a few better players doesn't mean they weren't world class. Looking at out and out centre forwards it's hard to see anyone better than Kane. More goals than games in the Premier League & World Cup qualifiers. The lad is absolute class, again and again he's pushed his sides over the line.
I don't get how this argument has gone to 8 pages. Do we all want England to do well? I'd say 99% of us do. Have they been hugely disappointing in recent tournaments? Undeniably. People want the team to succeed but see players who week in week out on Sky are touted as superstars get found out whenever they face a top level side. I want us to win. I think our players are over rated and badly led. I don't think the views are mutually exclusive.
I think this threads' going nowhere. However, I get the point that you are making. Most on here are English, and all are obviously football fans, so should throw their support behind our national team. Agreed. But it's not really worth arguing with folk who are basically saying they're losing their passion for supporting England when it seems players are losing passion for actually playing for England. It rubs off. In the 90s, England were good to watch, we were nearly men, but good to watch. In the 90s Oasis released a couple of fantastic albums which were very popular, but by the 00s they'd kind of run out of ideas and people stopped listening so much. Similar thing with the Football really.
My response on this thread (above) was pretty boring, in keeping with the other 8 pages so far. But this little beauty of yours has brightened it up. Genius. I'm off to Argos to buy some reduced patio sets to launch at that fat bloke next door who'll be cutting his grass, next summer, while I'm watching England draw with Ecuador.
Here's another statistic for you - England have won just four of any of their last 15 games in major tournaments.
Myself I am only bothered about what Barnsley do. I would love England to win a major tournament, but have no interest in watching them qualify in easy groups against poorer nations. Everyone in the squad earn more in a week than most of our life saving emergency workers earn in a number of years and that's wrong. We have a boring manager with a poor club level managerial record, that got the main job because it's a yes man in a suit to promote from within. Rightly or wrongly I also see the national team as southern because it's on their doorstep and wasn't built in a city accessible quicker for more people.
Sad...really sad.....love my club ....love my country. We are 10 years plus catching up with the Spain and Germanys of this world. On the whole our players are not technically as good as our neighbours. Spain could put out a third string midfield and it would be better than what we have now. I do it every match....... get beers and a pizza listen to the pre match hype then become suicidal after 35 mins!! I think we have maybe 4 players who are good with potential to go on....would any of them get in Germany's team.....NO. I will be all excited again next summer but deep down i know that it will be the same old....failure. Failure to hold on to the ball and to use it properly (like most of the other teams n players do)...it grates it just does. Until then we play 2 defensive midfielders and a leaky back four....we have zero creativity. Our players are over hyped. ..
Kane is a good player, possibly a great player, but if he is world class then you cannot just compare him to the Premier League. Is he better than Lewandowski? Bale? Messi? Suarez? Neymar? Ronaldo? Gyan? Dzeko? Van Persie? De Greizmann? Aubameyang? ... He might be one day, but he isn't yet.
On a more positive angle to switch this around......i see that Argentina are stuggling to qualify for Russia! Amazing...can we borrow Aguero and messi?!!
Related article below England aren’t underperforming – mediocrity is simply where they’re currently at Luke Ginnell There's nothing wrong with being a middle-of-the-road team. It's time for England's lunatic fringe to accept their side's place in the world... For most football fans, failure to win a trophy for 51 years is a good indicator that a particular team is, well, not very good. But many of the more Brexit-inclined England supporters, it seems, work off a different logic. The reality for the rest is that the Three Lions are, and have been for much of the last half-century, a moderately decent side. They’re not bad. They’re also not especially good. And there’s no shame in that. Unless it’s Germany or San Marino, the vast majority of international football teams fall into the same category as England. Yet there still exists a perception among the lunatic and semi-lunatic fringe of the England fanbase that their team is somehow underperforming; that abject failure in most of the preceding 25 or so tournaments is not in fact simply down to a lack of ability. But it is. What else could it possibly be? And yet the hype-machine inexorably turns. There’s a certain type of England fan that doesn’t want to believe that the team they love is just another also-ran. They insulate themselves against such an idea with talk of bad preparation, bad luck, bad management or bad attitude. England have the players, they think, it’s just a matter of them getting their act together. But this kind of delusion doesn’t really help anyone. It certainly doesn’t help the team, who, almost without exception, do their best for Blighty. It’s extremely rare to see an England player who isn’t giving 100% for the national side. You don’t get through qualification unless you’re motivated enough to grind out result after result against whatever minnow or minnow-plus turns up at Wembley. More often than not, however, in the important stages of the tournaments they encounter opponents who are, quite simply, better at football. Iceland in 2016 was a bit of an exception to the rule. For the most part, England end up eliminated by superior opposition. So it’s astonishingly unfair on the players to burden them with such astronomic expectations every second summer and then slate them when, inevitably, they don’t live up to them. It also doesn’t help the fans themselves. When you’re constantly bombarding yourself and those around you with FOOTBALL’S COMING HOME talk, you’re just setting yourself up for a fall. Massive, unmerited expectation leads to massive, merited disappointment. So why do some continue to subscribe to the spurious notion that England are ‘in the shake-up’ before each tournament? It can only be an outdated and laughably misguided belief in British exceptionalism. But brutally colonising half the planet and sparking a worldwide industrial revolution doesn’t mean you’re going to have a good football team 150 years later. The game has changed and England has fallen from the pedestal it once occupied. It’s time that the remaining few who believe otherwise see the Three Lions the way everyone else does.