Golden generation never applied to England of this era, and is overused in general. As crap as they were the last world cup, in 2002 and 2006 Ferdinand, Terry and Cole, plus Neville, were as good a back four as anyone outside Italy. Gerrard, Lampard and Rooney were the real problems, for different variants of the same reason: they all need the right kind of support (which they don't get with their country)/and have optimized their games to be flat-track bullies (another oversued phrase). Lampard needs space to enter the box late, the kind of space created by Drogba and other players who can overwhelm overmatched defenders. Gerrard, on the other hand, wants to do it all himself, which will tend to fail as the opposition improves--though unlike Rooney and Lampard, to be fair, he has scored a few in the world cup, and looked decent, overall. Rooney needs the right kind of service, which, again, he doesn't get. Fair enough to say that Messi and Ronaldo also can't seem to score in a world cup, but Rooney is the only one who seems to be poisoning the atmosphere while he's failing to score. As many have pointed out, England went wrong by devaluing Scholes, the best player of his generation, who made his teammates better, in favor of Lampard, who relies on having better teammates.
golden generation!! piss myself laughing at that one...didnt even qualify for Euro 08!! still I think at least one good thing Capeelo is doing is needling out the oldies...cant see Lamps being in too many more squads...ferdinand to follow soon...
