Just One More Year Of Hurt

It is virtually impossible to finish a football event without the r word creeping in. I wonder how these poor tormented souls feel when a black player scores for England.

Penalties. That is how close we were. A penalty can be the best or the worst in the world. An example of that was Rashford’s. He sent the keeper the wrong way and watched in anguish as it hit the post. A few inches the other way and it would have been a most wonderful goal. Small margins make big differences.

What I like about watching England is the gravitas of Southgate shines through the players in their determination to do the job. There is a pride that makes you want to watch because you feel they are trying for everybody out there.

At the same time this is also a bit of a post-mortem. My sister asked me on Monday why England sat back so much. By her own admission she is not a big football follower but that is how she saw it. It had been on my mind previously when we lost the world cup semi to Croatia.

Look at the opposition we have come up against in these two tournaments. This time round it has been Croatia, Scotland, Czech Republic, Germany (very disappointing), Ukraine, Denmark, and Italy. In the world cup it was Tunisia, Panama, Belgium (lost), Colombia, Sweden, Croatia, and Belgium (lost for third place). Not the most daunting set of opponents. Factor in that we were at home almost as much as we could have been this time and perhaps we are sitting on a couple of missed opportunities.

Consider the England qualifying results for this tournament. They won seven out of eight and scored 37 goals with an amazing goal difference of 31 – that is an average of around positive four per game. The opponents were Czech Republic, Kosovo, Bulgaria, and Montenegro. Not the world heavyweights but not complete walkovers either. To score 37 goals is phenomenal and suggests that we possess an outstanding group of strikers.

So, back to the final against Italy. What a time to be playing football. It is the middle of July after a long hard season. Italy played on Tuesday, England played Wednesday, both went to extra time.

Perhaps the problem for England is that we went ahead so early. Against Croatia we scored after 5 minutes and conceded on 68. With Italy we scored after 2 and conceded after 67.

If I were a player sitting on the bench, I would have been bitterly disappointed at my lack of game time. Heading towards the second part of extra time we caught a view of Grealish. He had just over 20 minutes to influence events and just prior to the 120th minute only half our substitutes had been used. Not a sniff for Foden.

The thing about Grealish and Foden is that they attack players, not quite the way Jorginho and Chiellini do, put players on the back foot and force the opposition the other way. Grealish is virtually impossible to stop once he is in motion and is a prime candidate to be fouled. If you want to speed the game up or slow the game down, bring him on. He can do both at the same time.

I feel we have the firepower to frighten teams and we should be using it more. Just because we are ahead, we should not sit back or sit so deep that we cannot get out of our half.

This, of course, is only my opinion. To get to penalties in a European Championship final is impressive. If we had won, would I be writing this? Probably not, because we would have had the right result.

Would we have won if we had been slightly more ambitious? Not necessarily but I cannot help feeling that we had some fantastic players who did not get enough opportunity to showcase their skills in a way that would have pushed the opposition into a more defensive situation. 37 goals in 8 qualifying ties. Can we unleash more of that attacking prowess in future, please?