England aren’t capable of dominating tournaments and Holland mistakes proved it
TERRIBLE decision-making and dreadful execution. England’s defence will not want to watch Thursday’s performance back. It should be said that it wasn’t just John Stones against Holland. Harry Maguire and Kyle Walker made some horrible errors in possession and could have cost us goals. There were far too many mistakes from the backline combined and […]
TERRIBLE decision-making and dreadful execution.
England’s defence will not want to watch Thursday’s performance back.
It should be said that it wasn’t just John Stones against Holland. Harry Maguire and Kyle Walker made some horrible errors in possession and could have cost us goals.
There were far too many mistakes from the backline combined and they were very, very poor.
Centre-back Stones was not being selected for the big games by Pep Guardiola at Manchester City during this season.
Perhaps Pep doesn’t trust him the way he did Vincent Kompany and Aymeric Laporte — and even Nicolas Otamendi.
At 25 he’s not a youngster any more and you cannot keep making the same mistakes.
Stones made the obvious errors this week as they led to goals and he’ll get a lot of criticism for it but he has to accept that.
COULD HAVE BEEN A LOT WORSE
You cannot expect at that level to keep making errors and to get away with it.
I’m not sure what he was thinking for the first goal, especially as he had been caught in possession by the Dutch previously.
It is all very well saying, well, ‘we are trying to play out from the back and that happens’ but it shouldn’t, those players have to be better than that.
We were punished and rightly so, but you have to admit that if Holland had a top-class front line, it could have been even worse.
Even at set-pieces, one of our main strengths at the World Cup, England looked all over the place.
Matthijs de Ligt is a real threat from set-pieces but we shouldn’t have had that much trouble — the Dutch looked like they were going to score with every one.
Defensively we are going to have to get much better and the middle of the team is not as good as Gareth would want it to be.
I keep hearing people use the excuse that we haven’t played for a few weeks and so were rusty.
It’s not a time to panic, we have made huge strides under Gareth Southgate
Alan Shearer
That’s not an excuse, one minute we’re saying the Premier League players play too much and now we have three weeks off, that’s no good either.
It’s about mistakes, the same mistakes, over again.
But it’s not a time to panic, we have made huge strides under Gareth and I hope we will continue to move forward ahead of the Euros.
I didn’t think we were ready to dominate games and tournaments just yet and that was proof against an decent Dutch side.
But we must remember some of the difficulties Gareth faced with the squad as well.
A Champions League final a few days before with Harry Kane and Jordan Henderson deemed not fit to start.
You look at the midfield and Fabian Delph and Ross Barkley have not been first picks at their clubs and not played many big games this year.
PLENTY OF POSITIVES
And West Ham’s Declan Rice is very new to this level so we should wait before judging him.
We were dominated in midfield and we need some players in there who are much better at receiving the ball with their backs to defenders, on the half turn, under pressure.
The Dutch were better than us at that.
City star Phil Foden is the promising player who will help bridge that gap and hopefully he gets the games under his belt next season to move forwards and get in the team.
The positives are that we have the likes of Trent Alexander-Arnold to come in at right-back and hopefully Joe Gomez plays enough games for Liverpool in the centre of defence to become a regular for England there.
It was the right decision not to play Kane against Holland.
We don’t have to play him in every game, as Gareth said, we can’t just constantly rely on one player — we’ve been punished when we did that with Wayne Rooney and David Beckham and others down the years.
I’m sure there will be changes for the Swiss game tomorrow — it’s absolutely pathetic that we have to play this game, no one wants it.
Most Read In Football
After a long, hard season they should be on their way home and packing for a holiday with the family.
When you’ve had a season like that on the back of a World Cup, another game that means nothing is the last thing you want.
Unfortunately, especially for the Spurs players in the camp, they have a long, hard summer to think about a couple of very poor performances before they get back to it next year.
