Piers Morgan is offering to give Gt Ormond St Hospital £1k for every goal Rooney scores, £2k for a volley and £3k for a bicycle kick. But he's still a ****.
I'm really not convinced that Balotelli is such a threat. I think in this tournament Di Natale and Cassano have looked better, and Balotelli just seems to be a big media whore to me. His whole fame seems to be based on reputation rather than anything he ever does on the pitch? What has he done that's so impressive to warrant the attention the media have been giving him lately? I can think of one goal (against United last year) which impressed me, but apart from that I've never even noticed him apart from doing stupid things. Having said that, he'll go and score a hat-trick now.
I rate Balotelli but Lescott thinks they can handle him, the lad is a brilliant player though the last one I remember like him was Cantona, special touch on the ball
Well he will prove his doubters wrong, people are quick enough to pick on faults but the kid is a great player. Tough to go out on pens again tonight but Italy were the better team, seen it happen so many times before that am not even feeling that down about it, well done to all the lads for a great effort for punching above their weight but we weren't good enough.
Pirlo was given too much space plain and simple. if we'd've closed down that space we maybe would have scored a couple of goals to prevent the penalties but who knows now
The defence and midfield were heroic with the amount of effort they put in despite being so obviously knackered over 4 games, even at the end of the France game Parker looked like he was going to die before long. What I couldn't understand last night is why Rooney didn't join in. Did anyone see him actually do anything off the ball? He seemed to be a complete passenger in a game where we actually needed strikers to close their deep-lying players down. I thought when we had the ball we were much more dangerous with it than they ever were (the commentators wanted to tell us it was some kind of football lesson, but what was the closest they came to scoring? Apart from that long-range shot in the first couple of minutes they hardly threatened considering the posession the they had) but we just let them have so much time on the ball and didn't even try to attack ourselves. I imagine a lot of it is to do with how tired the players were and it was just decided we would try to defend for the second half and extra time and to be honest if that was our game plan we deserved to go out really. I think we really need to sort something out to keep our players fitter and fresher at the end of the season. I don't have a suggestion really but at the end of our domestic season the players seem absolutely knackered and are always picking up niggling injuries. I mean everyone gets injuries like the Cahill one which was just a freak injury, but the likes of Lampard and Barry who had played so many games this season and eventually picked up muscular injuries, and Jack Wilshere (who is probably the answer to closing the gap between us and the better sides) has an injury which he sustained this time last year after playing a ridiculous number of games over the summer and Wenger actually said he was going to burn himself out. I think we need to do something about all these injuries and fatigue. There shouldn't be a situation where going into a tournament our players are so much more tired and injured than the other teams that we have to take a squad decimated by injury and people lie Henderson having to come on simply because the better players are so very tired. Also I know Hodgson is said to like his strict defensive game plan but we need to be a bit more adventurous than we have in this tournament, especially when some of our more creative players become fit.
It looks like we did everything possible to put off their penalty takers... please log in to view this image
cant remember the players name, but somebody somehow managed to put one wide from 6 yards out in the 2nd half, ballotelli blazed over from 6 yards, a corner was given but the look on his face said different, ballotelli also went clean through one v one, but hesitated and allowed terry to make a brilliant last ditch stop, the goal they scored was correctly given offside, but more luck then judgement on our defenders behalf and was very marginal...i know your a passionate england fan but it was embarrassing that 2nd half and extra time last night, everybody took the piss out of ireland v spain but we where nearly as bad
I agree it was embarassing that we sat back and defended and didn't have an attack of our own, but France, Greece and Czech did the same thing in the other quarters and the difference is we did it well and didn't concede. I'd much rather we had an attack ourselves and had a go at them but in terms of playing the way we set out to do, we did it really well and I never thought they came close. The Balotelli one were a corner given was the best chance I think because they got us facing our own goal and if Lescott did clear it I still don't know how he managed it, but considering the possession they had yopu'd expect them to do a Spain v Ireland job on us and they didn't. I don't think we were lucky not to concede at all.
I watched the game in the company of 3 women (no sarky comments please )who hardly know what a goalpost looks like, but the most telling comment I've heard about the match came from one of those women and was 'Why are we always giving the ball back to the blues?' something that was picked up on by our so called experts, and no I couldn't answer the question either.
I want to see a contest, so i'm rooting for the Portuguese tonight. Ref already seems a bit too quick to give a foul for anything. Better not spoil this match.
