I have purposely held off writing about England's defeat to Argentina on Wednesday night, because I wanted to watch all the fall out and listen to all the backlash before giving my opinion. It appears that you are either in one camp where you believe that Tommy Tickles is the only reason that England were knocked out, or you have to be in the other camp, where you believe that it was solely down to the players. Unsurprisingly I think it is a bit of A and a bit of B. It is possible that both things can be true, but I would say that we have all seen this happen before and under an array of different managers. I think that Tommy Tickles is an exceptional manager and I truly believe he has what it takes to take England to the next level, sure he has to and as far as I have heard, has taken responsibility for the loss against Argentina, he is more than aware that the buck stops with him and that his decisions and the manager of England are what he is judged on. The players also have to take responsibility for the manner in which they played after Anthony Gordon had put the 3 lions 1 up, instead of continuing to do what they were doing and try and double their lead within minutes as they did against Mexico, it appeared that the England players went back into their shell and fell into the mindset of, oh shit we are one up against Argentina and we need to hold on. The managers substitution decisions seemed to be based off of this in what could only have been his way of helping a team that were starting to struggle against a wounded animal like Argentina, of course he could've made a couple of attacking substitutions to try and give us an out ball to maybe alleviate some of the pressure that all of a sudden had been piled on us, but I'm not sure that was going to help us. It happened really quickly, suddenly the Argentines stopped shithousing about and realised that they were 1-0 down to the filthy English in a world cup semi final. To be fair to Scaloni he got his subs spot on and threw everything at us, it was obvious after they hit the post twice and forced Pickford into a couple of saves that it was only a matter of time before we cracked and they scored, there was no way we could repeat our defensive heroics against Mexico, and once they equalised there was only going to be one winner, so when Argentina took the lead 2 minutes into injury time, despite being disappointed, I'm sure we weren't shocked, we rallied at the end but it was too little, too late and finally yet another chance of making a World Cup final had slipped from our grasp.
The thing is I am not even that disappointed anymore, this is what England do, we get ourselves into a winning position and then we shoot ourselves in the foot, it has to be a mentality thing. Tickles came out and said that we are not comfortable enough in possession as a team to keep the ball and control the game like Spain do, and after seeing the stats and the amount of possession we had on Wednesday, as well as in other tournaments in the knockout stages, surely he has a point. This team is set up to counter attack and and take advantage of the spaces left behind when teams come at us, this was beginning to happen after we scored our goal and this was the perfect moment for us to catch them out, but our team retreated, despite Anthony Barry running down the touchline imploring our players to get forward, we retreated and no longer did we see our midfielders trying to break up the play and spring us forward, we retreated and in that moment the initiative was handed to Argentina, and I don't think introducing more attacking players at that point would've helped, in fact if we had more attacking players with the mindset the players had adapted the Argentinians may have swamped us even more, and then Tickles is pilloried for not shutting up shop. As far as I can see he couldn't win either way, at the end of the day though he made the decisions and he will be blamed, he doesn't care about what people think though because he did what he thought was right, he did what he believed to be the right thing to do at the right time, and whether people believe he was right or wrong he stood by it and had the conviction to make his decision. I already hear people saying he should be sacked immediately and we should bring in Eddie Howe, sorry, but what makes anyone think that Eddie Howe could do a better job, okay what about Pep, lets pay him whatever he wants and we will be world beaters, rubbish!! We could have Pep, we could have Didier Deschamps, we could have Jose Mourinho, Arteta, Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger, Bob Paisley, Brian Clough or or Scott Parker, it doesn't matter who the manager is as long as we have players who are so scared to lose a semi final or final in a major tournament that their fear causes them to shit the bed every single time.
Personally I think we should cut Tommy Tickles some slack and let him try again in the Euros in two years time, I mean unless he decides to leave of his own accord then he will be in charge anyway. He has had one tournament, in which he has lead his team to a semi final where we were 5 minutes plus injury time from getting there, I understand that Argentina weren't that great and I, like a lot of people coming into this game was confident that we had better players and could get the job done, but again it wasn't to be. We are so close to getting what we want, and I really believe that our current manager will win us a trophy, one day.
As George Michael so famously once said, "Wake me up before you go go, cos I aint planning on going solo" or something like that!!
