Liverpool's front 5 have been devastating this season.
Swap Suarez and Coutinho for Rooney and Welbeck from that Liverpool five, and you have the England front 5 and you saw last night how much more mediocre they played with those two changes.
Rooney/Welbeck vs Suarez/Coutinho essentially highlights the difference between United (plodding, predictable) and Liverpool (dynamic, pacy, scores lots of goals) this season.
Rooney is not in the top tier of strikers like Suarez, but we should stop bashing him because he's still one of our better players. We just need to manage expectations with such a mediocre set of footballers representing us.
Having said that, half the teams that will qualify from their group have no better a set of footballers than us... the difference is in the management and desire of the players.
Management can be solved by the FA actually employing someone sensible. But how come other countries have countless numbers of ex-pros turning into pretty good coaches who seem intelligent (Martinez, Klinsmann, Guardiola, Deschamps, Luis Enrique, Hyypia, De Boer) whereas our ex-internationals and ex-pros all seem undoubtedly stupid and rubbish at coaching modern football (Adams, Ince, Shearer, Robson, Pearce)?
Where are our intelligent, qualified ex-internationals?
I can envisage Lampard, G Neville, and Scholes being a good manager. But why do other countries have so many ex-pros turning to managing compared to us? Most of ours seem to just want to sit on a couch and get paid loads to be a pundit.