Details? I didn't hear that in the highlights coverage I zipped through. Neither he nor Rambo are our most important players right now, but they've been very good squad contributors of late so let's hope neither is out too long.
Not one England fan is saying these memes Boring hell And lol at de Jong being more creative and better in that regard than any English counterpart That is exageratting. The only creative players I noticed were in the front 3 The Dutch have been overrated for a while and their league is the pits. Altidore scored nearly 30 goals there ffs England's problem is shoe Horning the wrong players in like lampard and Gerrard and not countering/playing compact like 99%of football nations not named Germany, Spain and brazil
Plus I'm American. I thought they looked good. I thought Carrick/Henderson/Delph was an interesting trio.
If we're calling De Jong a pure hatchet man, then 'yes', he is a better ball player than his English counterparts. Those counterparts being Lee Cattermole, Paul Robinson, and Andy Wilkinson.
I tend to agree with this. I thought it was interesting that Loew was prepared to use Lahm, move Ozil and even play Kramer in the world cup final in order to have a well balanced midfield at all times.
Holland overrated? By whom? Talent wise we have produced 10 great players for every 1 Englishman and thats just a fact I know the truth hurts.
But none of those players have even gotten a game for England. De Jong has 80(!!) caps. England has a lot of problems, but they did try to bunker at the last Euros. That.........did not go well. I'm not English, and that's not remotely true. Besides, the great period of Dutch talent has been over for a long time. It's not the late 80s/early 90s anymore.
But Mourinho isn't a tactical genius and never has been. He's flexible, but he's not innovative. He realized quickly that a 4-3-3 would destroy England since it was, at the time, so surprising to English sides, but he's no Guardiola. Mourinho is actually a lot more like Redknapp, except without all the dodgy transfer dealing
Robben, RvP and Sneijder those were our under achievers care to guess how they matchup to Englands golden generatioon? Dude Holland has sucked and I know that but we still got to the WC Final and Semi with trash so whats that say about England lollll I mean really
Again, I'm not an England fan, though calling Robben an underachiever isn't overly harsh,if you think about it.
Oh I know and they are an under achieving generation which we all know in Holland they really came on late otherwise their legacy would be even worse this next crop is "meh" but we shall see
I think describing managers as tactical geniuses is overblown in general. Most managers at the Premier League level are fairly competent tactically. The players are what makes the difference. Case in point (just to use an example): Mourinho's won league titles when he's had the most talented team in the league, but hasn't when he hasn't had the most talented team in the league. This has been true in England, Italy, Spain, and probably Portugal as well (cups are obviously a different animal). And Mourinho's considered a good tactician. Also, the way we think about tactics is probably incorrect: we think about it in terms of formations. However, just about any manager at the top level sees that as rudimentary stuff - the formations are the architecture within which a team plays. Tactics are much more along the lines of: move five meters this way when X player touches the ball, or Y player has a tendency to get forward and out of position so drop deeper to create space behind Y. The best analogy I can think of comes from defense in American football (because the tactics are much more obvious there, especially on defense). The scheme of a team's defense, be it 3-4, 4-3, or something else, is like a team's formation. How teams decide when to blitz, how to set up coverages for a given game, and the like, is analogous to tactics. Much of the work regarding formations has to be done during downtime: there's necessarily a lot of teaching involved so that players can understand what their roles are in a given formation. That teaching is downplayed a lot, because its not immediately obvious. We consider Fergie and Guardiola to be excellent tacticians because they did such an excellent job of teaching their players how to perform their roles within a given team. It's more accurate to call them good strategists and good teachers. </end rant: this wasn't directed at you, nice. It's something I've been mulling over for a while, and your post just happened to trigger it>
Gotze scored the winning goal in the World Cup final. And quite an absurd goal it was. But Schurrle's cross was even better than the finish - a high arced cross that landed perfectly on Gotze's chest. I think we perceive flair very differently - if your definition of flair is doing outrageous things on the pitch (ala Ronaldinho), then no Germany don't have much in the way of flair. I tend to think of it as positive attacking play, creative movement off the ball, excellent technique, and playing at speed. But that's my bias from watching Arsenal: there's a lot of different ways to play the game, obviously.
From the Guardian, Welbeck sustained a knee injury in the second half yesterday. http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/mar/28/danny-welbeck-baines-milner-england
See Welbz meg that guy in build up for goal 1 for pig boy Rooney? Soon to be our top scorer ever and has about 4 of those goals in major tournies....Most have come vs builders and post men in far off euro countries with a population less than 25
As any decent chess player knows, common media use confuses tactics and strategy. Guardiola is influential both at the strategic and tactical level. He comes up with different strategic approaches for different games, and micromanages some tactical implementation. However unlike other managers, Guardiola allows his teams a lot of freedom of decision making at the operational level. Ferguson was not even a tactical manager by the end - a role he had outsourced to Rene M. Jose is very focussed on the operational level - much more than Ferguson & Guardiola
Giroud with his customary weekly goal today vs Denmark and TGSEL. France leads 2-0 at half time. Kos is starting as well in CD.