(England win the group and play Ecuador on Sunday in the last 16):
Obviously everyone feels tremendously sorry for the injured Owen, who's almost definitely out of the World Cup. But this could be a blessing in diguise.
While Sven's selection of strikers was always irresponsible and laughable (the injured Owen, the injured Rooney, the untried and unseen 17yr old Walcott, the erratic Crouch, and NO FIFTH STRIKER), the paucity of his options may now force him into a more innovative line-up.
Given few strikers and many excellent midfielders, I thought before the World Cup he should practice playing 4-5-1 (as Arsenal did to progress to the Champions' League final).
Sven did so in one of our warm-up games, but his policy of always-picking-the-best-players-rather-than-the-best-team meant that the one striker he selected was Owen. Owen is the striker least suited to this system in the world.
Now he may be forced to play this way, as I believe both Crouch and Rooney are much more suited to it. THe line-up would look like this when we are defending:
(4-5-1)
Rooney
JCole, Lampard, Hargreaves, Gerrard, Beckham
ACole, Terry, Rio, Neville
and 4-3-3 when we are attacking:
JCole, Rooney, Gerrard
Lampard, Hargreaves, Beckham
ACole, Terry, Rio, Neville
By the Way, I've kept the faith in Hargreaves as our holding midfielder when most of the country were hating him. He has had a some poor games for England, I admit, but they were usually when he was being played out of position in right midfield or right back. Last night, in the specialist position he plays for Bayern Munchen (making him, incidentally, one of the England players with the most trophies), he did very well indeed.
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4 comments:
Still a newbie to the sport, I don't really have any intelligent comments to add or argue about this game, or any of the others. However, I can say that I watched three games over the weekend with my opa (a record for me). Very interesting and exciting stuff, both the games and listening to my opa refer to the goal tenders and goal as door keeper and door. We watched the 1-1 France/Korea game, the Ukraine slaughter of Saudi Arabia (4-0) and the Spain/Tunisia 3-1 victory.
Slowly, with each game, I could feel the little football fan within me begin to grow. Then, I found myself checking out the world cup site to keep up on game results. Even bookmarked it at work. I think it all began weeks back when I was actually looking through our local weekend newspaper to catch the results of the final Arsenal game. Is this how it all starts?
Who knows what could happen if we actually had cable TV.
But you'll stop (no, really, you will) before reaching the point of giving an entire room in our house an Arsenal theme!
So who is it going to be Peter... France or Italy??? Lets hear your predictions before the main event.
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