Match Day Thread European Championships Thread

He was almost going sideways!

Unfortunate that the 2 brought on late into the game were two of the players who missed.

Typically English eh!?

We just needed to keep going in the first half I feel but it felt a bit like watching us under Ivic last season.

Score and then hope to hold on which is always dangerous.

In extra time we seemed to attack more and have a threat again once Grealish came on.

Southgate clearly has the respect and and support of the squad, media and FA which is a start.

Maybe could have done better tactically tonight but he will say we only lost on penalties and they scored from a corner.

The draws have been favorable at times but that isn't our fault and still got to win.

Be more pressure now I guess but a bit unfortunate the next tournament is in a hot environment like Qatar which probably won't suit us.

 

Never fear - technology's here. Won't be able to use the heat as an excuse...

https://www.fifa.com/tournaments/me...rmind-behind-qatar-2022-s-air-cooled-stadiums

 

A few years ago now when Morocco applied to host the World Cup the excuse given for refusing them was that it was too hot there in summer ! The unspoken sentence between the lines may have been ''they don't have enough money to bride us''. Heat isn't the only problem with Qatar - like thousands of workers dying to built stadiums, the situation for gay people, and lastly they don't recognise the existence of Israel - so what happens if they qualify ? There is a strong movement to pressurize the Dutch into boycotting this event, which is also strong in Scandinavia. Could larger nations follow suit ? The sooner we have a revolution against FIFA the better.

 

Very disappointed BUT our young team held the best team in the tournament to a draw for 120 minutes, we can be proud of our performances in this tournament. Hopefully bodes well for next 2 World Cups and next Euros.

As for the penalties we only missed one by a whisker and the other 2 were saved by a very good goalie, as were two of their pens. Why the abuse of young players appalling.

Radio 4 news said the Italian goal was spectacular this morning - seriously!?

As for the drunken scum.....

 

It is clear that the vast majority of spectators went to enjoy the game and were not in any way the cause of trouble. However there were enough who had no regard for others to spoil the occasion. To give someone a contract to police something of this size, who in turn employ people in need of £30 or £40, is asking for trouble. Would you stand up against a mob and face getting injured for this amount? We remember how the Olympics in London had to call out the army when G4S failed to employ enough stewards. It seems that lessons have not been learned. There was some video on social media last night of a man, I will not call him a fan, openly snorting cocaine inside the ground during the game. Other video showed grown men fighting in the concourse, and kicking an Asian fan's head after knocking him to the ground, despite him wearing an England shirt. These are the images that flash around the world, and make people wonder what is wrong with the country. Add in some of the outright racist messages being sent out and people such as myself wonder what should be happening, but isn't. It is difficult when you have a PM with a turn of phrase that can be taken as racist, and a Home Secretary who says it is fine to boo your team for standing up against this cancer within. All those who went to enjoy the game peacefully should be asking the countries leaders to act in a far better way.

 

I think they only held Scotland to a draw for 90 minutes. Who knows what the score would have been after 120...

And as for the drunken scum - ditto. Quite what the answer is to that particular scourge is anyone's guess - whatever is being done now to combat it quite plainly isn't working. In my opinion, part of the problem is the derisory 'punishments' handed down by UEFA/FIFA - for me, that only encourages poor behaviour by fans who perceive that they are escaping unpunished.

 

I think Morocco have had bids rejected a few times - at least twice that I can remember (South Africa and France) the decisions were controversial. In 2010, they actually got more votes than South Africa. A member of the FIFA Executive Committee admitted in a taped conersation not only that he had been bribed to vote for South Africa in 2010 and for France in 1998, but that the announced vote tally - 14 to 10 - didn't match what all the delegates themselves calculated. Mind you, another delegate (Jack Warner - who forever ruined the image of Dixon of Dock Green) admitted that he had accepted a $1million bribe from Morocco as well as a $10million one from South Africa.

As far as Qatar goes, as F1Hornet has also pointed out, what will the situation be re alcohol? Not to mention the safety of visiting female fans...

 

The one advantage of Qatar is that they will know how to deal with drunken English fans.

 

Ben Foster was at the final.

 

The police won't need to deal with them NZ. If they get drunk and throw off their shirts in the 40 degree + temperatures of Qatar (as if they were in Brighton) then they will pay for it anyway. Our drinking culture is suited to northern climes not to there.

 

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And the twat who stripped off completely to show his genitals to all and sundry would pay more than most...

 

One thing is for sure we probably won't get the World cup in 2030 we were hoping for.

 

Video of concourse fighting. One Asian English fan being punched and kicked when down.

 

All sorts of videos going around with people kicking each other.

Some having broken through the gates without tickets and others trying to retaliate.

This is inside the ground too..

Such a shame all this has taken up most of the headlines.

Certainly means UEFA/FIFA won't be rushing back with a major event.

 

It's almost as if it was a bad idea to lets tens of thousands of people without tickets to the game in close proximity to the stadium and let them drink for 10 hours before kick-off.

Just to add to it, the F1 driver Lando Norris was mugged on his way from the stadium to his car.

 

Why do the majority of sensible people tolerate this behaviour?
Some strong policing, dealing with these idiots severely would soon stop it. Zero tolerance required.
The police should be immune from any sort of comeback or criticism if they were allowed to deal with the problem.
In addition, surely the racists on FB etc can be identified and deal with similarly?

 

This is a social problem surely. People having no respect for others shouldn't be left to footballers to make statements about, but should come from elected leaders. Tyrone Mings has said, You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ & then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens." As for having police cracking down on this behaviour, it is well known that there are not the numbers of them available, and it is cheaper to provide untrained stewards. If you wish to have a larger police force then taxes will have to rise, unless you stop giving a slice of the money every time to private companies.

 

The fact that Marcus Rashford found it necessary to write an apology to the nation shows how far we have gone down the wrong road. If it hadn't been him it would have been someone else - and if it hadn't been one of our team then one of the Italians would have felt he had to 'apologize to the nation'. this is always the case in penalty shoot outs - there is always a fall guy. How can what is supposed to be a team sport come down to this ? The italians also know a great deal about this having been knocked out of 3 World Cups in a row on penalties in the 90s - which meant 3 heartbroken Italians who had to 'apologize to the nation'. When the italians last won the European championships in 1968 they had a civilized schedule with fewer teams and the possibility of replaying the final (against Yugoslavia) - that was in the days when competitions like this were not blown up as they are now. EUFA must ask questions about how they produced a competition with more travelling then ever before at a time of a global pandemic - and how it was allowed that stadiums in Budapest and London were full whereas others were half or three quarters empty as in Munich. The European press was more concerned about 60,000 fans without masks turning up in a Corona hotspot then anything to do with hooliganism - this and the lack of any regulation from EUFA.

The fact is that this game had been blown up out of all proportion in a highly melodramatic way - so that a young lad who had done nothing during the evening came on and had to take the pressure of reversing 55 years of pain and dissapointment with one kick of the ball. And this '55 years years of pain and dissapointment' had been so built up into a national hysteria that acts of hooliganism were more or less inevitable when it finally went flat. Racial targeting of players is not unique to England - Mario Balotelli was only considered italian when he was playing well, and players like Emre Can, Gundogan and Mesut Ozil have experienced the same in Germany - they're only German in good times.

 

...and stop indulging in war games and weapons of mass destruction in the hope of fooling the world into thinking that you are still a 'World Power'.

Damned right elected leaders should be doing something about it - something positive agreed to by all rather than just by one party, something which doesn't just fit that party's political agenda. Especially when that party represents just 43% of the electorate yet act like corrupt dictators treating the country as their own personal cash cow. Instead, we have party members on private WhatsApp groups saying things like this - about the only good thing I've seen to come out of GBNews:

Rather revealing about the true thoughts of her and her ilk - and it serves her right that she was exposed and forced to make a grovelling apology. I'd suggest that she and her colleagues spend a little more time thinking about how their own performances are causing nothing but problems than running down others. After all, it speaks volumes about them that Marcus Rashford has three letters after his name (MBE) for 'playing politics' on a part time basis, yet they don't for doing the same on a full time basis.

As to police numbers - I'm not sure that low numbers is the problem. It's more a case of how current numbers are being utilised and by whom. A prime example would be Priti Patel deploying Met Police officers to break into a company's private property because there was an artistic display on the roof of the property which she didn't like. They are not hers, or any other MP's, to do with what she will - they are there to uphold the Law on behalf of everyone.