I think that Pearce has got the balance of the side wrong, again. No playmaker, two attacking midfielders and three wingers? Lots of possession but no real penetration and a distinct lack of a goal threat, so far.
Exactly. I was preparing to write a rant about Pearce's tactics and selection at half time but you've pretty much covered it. He's an idiot. 2-0 down now. Caulker sleeping.
There was an article in the Fail the other day suggesting that Hoddle should take over from Pearce after this tournament. Might be a good idea, as long as he could leave all the mysticism at home. Really poor dive from the Norwegian right-back, there. I thought he'd slipped at first, but he appealed for it.
He can leave any wingback tactics at the door too! Get Henderson/Chalobah off, put Wickham on and put Redmond on the right and Ince on the left. Too many players are out of position. Caulker just had a goal ruled out for a very marginal offside. Unlucky.
3-1 and we're back in it somehow. Dawson "won" the penalty when not even he appealed and it looked very soft. The same player stepped up and scored from the spot.
Well we're out and I struggle to believe that Pearce could possibly rate any of the midfielders on show over Carroll. Wasn't impressed with Rose but Smith did really well, I felt.
No idea what Pearce was thinking late on in that second half, as his decision to play it long suited Norway down to the ground. Awful choice. England need to bring in a more progressive coach at this level and start taking these tournaments seriously. Tom Carroll must've been looking at that midfield and wondering how he'd have done. My money would be on a considerable improvement.
I have never been a fan of Pearce as a manager, but fair play to him for his honesty in his post match interview. Incidentally, not a very diplomatic choice of pundits by Sky as it was Henning Berg who tried to boot Robbo out of Blackburn.
Didn't wait for the interviews but from the BBC quotes it sounded like he was just blaming the players again. I think he should acknowledge his own faults in setting up the team to play like Bolton in one game and Barcelona the next is confusing and unreasonable.
He said the players haven't performed like he knows they can, which Tom Ince later reiterated. Anyway, I don't know what I am doing putting in a good word for him, as I think he's a complete berk.
Haha, I just think that if he's asking the players to look at their performances and take the blame then so should he, which is where he should be starting his post match interview. We were incapable of posing much of a goal threat in either game despite changing around the players. Today we played a weaker side with more of our better attacking players available yet other than a penalty we hardly created and hardly worked the 'keeper, as a manager he should be embarrassed for trying to blame the players.
I know managers will learn over time but Pearce was the mastermind who, at his brief stint as manager of Forest, proclaimed he could 'See the carrot at the end of the tunnel'. Who picked his first ever Forest team and when he showed it to his wife she wanted to know why he had left out the goalie and picked 11 out-field players. He might have improved since then but not much on this showing.
Sounds like an enormous balls up, but how much of one depends very much on what the song was, in my opinion. "Numerous references to the 'n word'" is a very strange sentence. Was it used or not? The DJ might have played the airwaves-friendly versions of Kanye Wests Gold Digger or Cee-lo Green's Forget You, both of which feature the word in the uncensored originals, but only vaguely hint at it in the single versions.
Switched over to F1 from the Russia - Holland game after a goalless first half an hour and just seen it's finished 5-1 and the bloody race hasn't even started yet!
