Once again Slav nails it!
Whilst dreary pundits blah blah on about how impressive England are and how many great options they appear to have, our West Ham boss tells the unvarnished truth.
Here’s what he has to say about our performance against Slovakia and includes an overview of the realities of the group.
He said: “The next game the better the opponent is it’s going to be a more two-sided game. Let’s not praise for possession because [England] played against a team that didn’t come to play. Of course you’re going to have more possession.
‘But the quality of English reaction and action in the last third of the pitch was quite poor.
‘It shows like many good teams, like Germany, England are also struggling when there opponent is defending with numbers and they are hard to beat.
‘The players we don’t have to be harsh on, but we don’t need to praise them for this kind of display.
‘You need from these kind players when there is no space to make space. All that they were doing was passing: one-two, one-two, one-two.
‘Nobody tried to beat his own player or to do something to break the opponent who is defending with eight players.’
Spot on Slav, if you play with a team of players who aren’t fit, can only play one system and you can only replace with like for like substitutions this is what you get. If you had put Antonio and Cresswell in that team and Andy Carroll up top you would have created more clean cut chances and if you swapped the clearly unfit Henderson for Noble or Drinkwater you would have had a different shape and energy to the midfield. Despite the possession there was no penetration and a lack of good movement in the midfield, Slovakia defended well but they were hardly ever forced out of position by our thick uncreative midfielders, it was a boring match to watch and it will get worse when we play any good teams, other than Clyne, Dier and Lallana it was hard to pick out any player that could score more than 5 out of 10 in a rating.
I doubt anybody would praise England for that display, now if, and it’s a big if, we get through to the next round we have to play France i believe…