Nation's League: England vs España

Starting line-up:

De Gea; Carvajal, Nacho, Sergio Ramos, Marcos Alonso; Busquets, Saúl, Thiago; Isco, Iago Aspas y Rodrigo Moreno.

I would have liked to see Busquets fased out as well, and Kepa in the goal, but let's see how Enrique's 1st game as a coach goes.

 

First 10 minutes pretty much even with no real chances on either side

 

Lol having said that England score

 

Damn and it's 1-1 nice attack

 

Lol, trying to get them offside in a fk cross totally botches. They almost got a chance from that

 

Gol! Rodrgo puts us in the lead 1-2

 

Ooof Saul almost with his 2nd

 

De Gea with his 1st save for Spain in almost 4 months or so just before that

 

Very silent game from Isco so far

 

oof nice attack by Spain and Thiago almost scores

 

A good save by De Gea, it was called offside anyway though

 

1-2 ft

England had a goal removed in my opinon rightly so. t's within the penalty area and the golie has the ball in his hands

 

We won and we we looked it a little better than them overall regardless of the scoreline. It could be just because it's the first offical game of the 'new' team, but I wasn't really convinced by a few things.

Pressure from the top. We were constantly giving pressure with only 1 or 2 players up top. Making it easy for them to pass it to the free man. We used to do this as a team; but now it was just the forwards doing so most of the time with zero results.

Our midfield at times looked like swiss cheese. England at times just simply passed through our midfield (not high crosses, a low pass) and bypassed it completely. I mean this can happen obviously, but it happened numerous times that I'm wondering if there was something wrong with the placement or directions given to the mf.

Enrique seems a bit 'cowardly' in the sense of playing and subs. Cowardly is too much of a strong word, but you get my drift. He added in 2 defensive players for more mid/forward ones, doesn't like a full team pressuring their defense, likes to keep back more players when we have a corner.

Still some hiccups with team communication. The offside trap was funny. Needs more training that one.

The press is eating it up because we beat them, but I honestly don't rate England that highly to begin with. Nor do I rate us that highly, but still better than them at least. I don't know, it's still early days but I'm not feeling the same optimism as I had when Lope took over (and I thought at the time Lope was a bad choice, and he turned me around very fast)