I am surprised at how poor an understanding most England fans have when it comes to analysing a football match.
The sheer ignorance of people who assume that yesterdays 4-1 result was a thrashing is quite disturbing. I often wonder if their only means of calculating how well we played is by the score.
For starters, germany's first goal never should have stood, freeze frame the moment before klose slots it past james and you will see klose illegally disposed of upson by using his right arm across upson's face. At that point both players were involved in a 50/50 chase for the ball. It was a clear foul.
Before Germany's second goal, Defoe was incorrectly given offside when he headed onto the crossbar, freeze frame the release of the ball and you will see Defoe was level with the german defender.
Lampards effort to poke home from 6 yards was very unlucky, only a finger tip from the goalkeeper kept it out.
Lampard scored an equaliser enough said about that.
Two of lampards free kicks were handled by the germans, who were in the wall, hardly accidental if you consider the ball was on target, and they know its coming, so should have been penalised, but werent. One led directly to a german break out and a goal.
lampard hit the crossbar from 40 yards, the keeper well beaten, another chance for an equaliser.
In the first 15 mins of the second half we had several chances on goal including defoe, gerrard, and milner. Another near miss when the ball almost fell to gerrard. In that period germany never saw the ball, it was all england.
I am sure we would have won this match had the officials got it right.
Gerrard played an excellent match, his passing was world class, and he was clearly man of the match.
Rooney was poor all tournament, and only did some good things in the early stages of the second half, when we were pressing. Perhaps that explains it, because Man Utd are always pressing, and thats why he sees so much of the ball for his club.
lampard was poor in the group games, but was very good yesterday.
Ashley Cole had a good solid world cup.
John Terry was good in the group games apart from one bad back pass. Yesterday he was poor.
All in all we played pretty well yesterday, with Gerrard being our driving force. That match could have gone either way, and a shocking error by the ref cost us dearly. I still also believe germany's ist goal was illegal.
Its a shame we didnt have yesterdays intensity for the group stages, otherwise we could have avoided germany. I am still proud of our players, who tried their guts out, and got shafted by the officials.
We are a decent side, but not good enough to have genuine goals not given, and still overcome that and prevail.
Only a brilliant team can win against those sort of barriers.
So are we good enough to win the world cup? Probably not, but its still frustrating to go out of the tournament in that manner, and events yesterday further fuels my argument that the officials have ruined this world cup.
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