Yep, everyone loses, thanks for that input. Adds nothing and missus the point. The ones that win, win tournaments when favoured to do so too, while winning the close and/or, ir relevant, the 50/50 ones <—- England’s genuine issue, good England squad have never struggled to beat the teams Southgate has, Sven for instance never got that kind of luck is his scheduling. And Robson
hit Argentina and Germany in the semi’s not Croatia and Denmark.
It’s hard to compare generations and that’s fine.
Talk about missing the point....
Yeah, if you win a tournament, that means also winning the close games, and sometimes also getting the unlikely wins. By
definition, actually. Because if you don't do that, you don't win the tournament.
However, only one team manages that, each tournament. And like it or not, chance plays a fairly significant, and probably greatly underappreciated, role in the outcome of any football game. There is nothing any manager can do that guarantees you'll beat Croatia in a given game, or Germany, or France. The only thing you can do is get your team in a position where there's a relatively good rather than pretty slim chance that is going to happen. Once you get to the top opposition, the odds are
never going to very far removed from even, no matter what you do. In reality, there's very little difference between 2018 Belgium crashing out in the semis against France and 2018 Belgium going on to win the title. The difference between England winning the Euros and losing on penalties in the final is so small as to be downright meaningless in the assessment of a manager. It's basically luck and coincidence.
This means that if you're looking at the results of a national team manager, you do have to contextualise, but that also means accepting that part of the context. One of the upshots is you have to focus on the aggregate results. If the team is generally winning more often and losing less often in tournaments, then probably something has been done right. And you could well argue that nothing could be more stupid or misleading than focussing solely on a single, or a very few, games against the top opponents, because that is a) a small sample and b) games which pretty much by definition can always go either way, often down to small and uncontrollable factors. The fact England lost to Italy on penalties tells you basically nothing whatsoever about England and Southgate that wouldn't have been essentially equally true had they won it on penalties. What is important is that England was in that game at all - and played it well enough to have had a real chance of winning it. That's actually what you can hope to get from a manager. Managers do not win or lose close games against top opponents, as Pep Guardiola is reminded every year in the CL. Maybe they can do a few things that has some negative or positive impact, but mainly it's not down to them.
Above all, I wish England fans would give a few seconds thought to how
their mentality is affecting results. When you've won nothing for almost 50 years and have a pretty consistent history of underachievement at big tournaments, you need to build something. And building something requires positive belief. That isn't much helped by a general climate where you're barely being tolerated while things go well, and must expect to be eviscerated the second they don't. England has developed to the point where they are seriously in the picture as potential finalists for the third straight tournament, and as potential winners for the second straight tournament. In other words, they have stablished themselves as a real, top team. That is REAL progress - it has
never before been the case for as long as I have been watching, which is since the late 70s. But rather than see that as one big step taken and now for the next, people are instead disgusted by the failure to conform to their delusional ideas about how dominant England
should be, which can only make the team's job that much harder. Most other countries, the fans actually try to support what's going on, and quite often make a positive contribution. You lot, you've been getting exactly what you deserve. And from Southgate, a good deal more than you deserve.
