Cole Palmer

We were an extra inch on Gazza's studs from making the Euros final under Venables.

I call that close to achieving summat.

And we were playing superb football then, which is in sharp contrast to what we do now.

 

See also Real Madrid's galacticos period where Makelele wasn't flashy enough, was sold the same year they signed Beckham and they won nowt for a few years due the resulting midfield imbalance.

 

Southgate has come a hell of a lot closer than that.

 

He does indeed have a wonderful c.v. of glorious failures.

 

You'll have to remind me. Don't remember more than anyone else for England.

 

I'd be happy with Tomori playing.

 

You might have forgotten, in Euro 96 ( despite being fun) the football wasn't that superb,we didn't have to qualify for the tournament, we only scored 8 goals in the whole shebang, 4 of those in that great performance against Holland, we had 3 draws and only beat Spain on pens in the quarters after they outshot us and had an arguably good goal disallowed.

 

I remember that we lost to Germany on pens in the semi final, after being more than a match for them, which seems to me to be close to doing rather well.

We won 2 of our 3 group matches (including Scotland and a classy Dutch side).

We also had a back four plus Gazza, McManaman, Platt, Anderton, Shearer and Sheringham. Hardly a sniff of one holding midfielder, never mind two.

 

Back in the day of 16 teams in the finals it was far tougher to qualify. Doubt we would have ever failed to qualify under these modern rules where you can still qualify by finishing third.

 

A bit of a moot point though as England have won every qualifying group they've been in under Southgate.

 

We drew 1-1with Switzerland, beat Scotland 2 nil after Scotland missed a pen to equalise, but beat Holland well, no round of 16 at the time, got lucky against Spain 0-0 after being outshot, Spain had a goal disallowed and we won on pens...1-1 with Germany and lost on pens.
Netherlands weren't that classy though...they only scored 3 goals in the whole tournament.

 

Ahhh, the mists of time....

 

You must be related to him ...he cocked up in his last match gainst Brazil but they fluffed it...a few more

 

It seems weird praising one team for losing a semi final while hammering a manager who lost a final.

 

This is just a myth mate. He has.

 

You may note that my contribution to this thread arose by virtue of a response to a pronouncement that we had not even come close to any international footballing success since Alf Ramsay, apart from the supposed recent success of Southgate.

I pointed out the inaccuracy of such statement, in my opinion

Praise and hammering has nothing to do with it. The end result of all efforts post 1966 however remain as no success.

If you watched our last 2 internationals, and indeed many more under Southgate, and thought that we play attractive football to the best of our squad's ability, that does seem weird to me.

If we can't play well with the talent we have now got, then we never will.

 

I think given the limited amount of time a national coach has with the players it's far easier to coach them to be pragmatic, well drilled on basic shape and effective that way than it is to coach them to play free-flowing attacking football.

If we tried to batter teams with total football and got cut apart on the counter he'd get hammered for being naive.

 

Anyone thinking Saka and Rice will play for England in the Euros will be disappointed, they are already fatigued and will be expected to play every minute of every game by Arteta, he'll ground them into dust. And he's destroyed the back up keeper by mugging him off publicly.

Cole Palmer is an option on the right but Pep worked out he can't play with Foden so get ready for Bowen.

Walker won't play the full tournament either, he's patched up at minute. Shame Ben White threw his dummy out.

 

Agree with the overall sentiment in that we didn't do all that much to be within a whisker of the final, but that Holland game is the best I've ever seen England. It was an amazing night. The performance against Germany was very, very good too. Against Spain we were quite lucky.

I've also seen probably a dozen amazing nights under Southgate. Southgate is the best England manager in my lifetime, without a shadow of a doubt. I don't understand why people underplay what he's done. And equally I don't want to underplay the two Germany semi-finals, that match against Holland, that 3-1 against France, Lineker's hattrick against Poland and Mara cheating f*****g Dona.