I'd welcome a debate, just not baseless insults from comparative footballing pygmies, who when challenged cannot express any alternatives which seemed to be the case with the two muppets earlier.

Despite all the criticism I've not noticed any English alternatives to Hodgson being suggested. Like I say it is easy to simply pick holes post match. If people felt so strongly why didn't they make the same points after the Moldova/San Marino/Brazil games.

Some of the comments are also clearly motivated by club allegiance.

btw excellent point @clive82. When theres failure everyone plays the blame game. Hodgson is the man for England atm

@mexicano do you underestimate Montenegro? I think they played some good football and credit to them. Their performance was better than england's in the second half but we should not blame the manager for that but the players (in my opinion). Hodgson's tactics were good. and in case you didnt know montenegro is one of two sides that we never managed to beat. Can we blame Hodgson for that? Certainly not

Montenegro played very poorly first half, got a good old fashioned rollicking at half time and played better with an enlivened home crowd behind them in the second half. It's not as if there was some tactical masterstroke that turned the game in their favour that Hodgson or anyone else failed to pick up on.

England played very well first half and were outplayed in the second. Had they grabbed the goal at the end they would be being hailed as world beaters this morning.

We are what we are, and a draw at Montenegro is not the end of English football anymore then a 3-0 win would have meant we were going to win the world cup.

frankly you wonder why anyone would touch the england job with the proverbial at the moment

even graham taylor with the likes of carlton palmer, geoff thomas and andy sinton had better resources than this motley crew of has beens and never will bes

problem with this motley bunch is their feted day in day out,told their something special,and soon as they go in front they cant help themselves, they think there world beaters and start sauntering around posing on the ball,danny welbeck done jack **** in the game starts doing fancy flicks backheels for no reason
we have the ridiculous situation where fergie has the media convinced an absolute bog standard manure team is the best he,s coached, we,ve gerrard feted as a superstar who,s not 70% the player he was 5 years ago,and wasnt good enough then,

i,m now watching a prime example adam johnson crying he,s not in england team whilst he,s getting booed for every touch at sunderland,after spending 18 months looking like a pub player at city despite been surrounded by superstars

Front page makes for interesting reading.


http://footballisfixed.blogspot.co.uk/

not some old duffer still trying to to recreate the Wingless Wonders.

Maybe you need to look at your "world class" players.

you can go on about the relative merits of differnt teams as much as you like.

but, having seen the first half, the change made by montenegro, and the lack of a response from our manager shows me what his shortcoming are.

AyersRock
Date Joined:     27 Oct 11
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27 Mar 13 20:40 Joined: 27 Oct 11 | Topic/replies: 707 | Blogger: AyersRock's blog
this will all be fogotten about when england qualify,

-------------

...then remembered when we go out in the second round in very similar circumstances.

Hodgson said: “We were trying to hold on to make the change at a slightly later time, and we were trying to make it at the corner kick.
“We wanted to move Steven deeper and move Ashley in the wide position.
You’re always debating changes, talking with your staff. But at 1-0 we weren’t 100 per cent convinced there was a change to make a vast difference to what was going on on the field.”

Really? :

Subs not used: Foster, Walker, Baines, Caulker, Lampard, Parker, Osman, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Defoe, Sturridge, Forster.

I've got some simpleton *

Agree with the anti Hodgson posts

He is not a bad manager , he can do certain things, principally he is good at taking over teams that are poorly organized defensively, correcting this , and making them difficult to beat, and dangerous at set pieces.

But this is all he can do , and it wasn't defensive competence and being able to score headers from corners that England were especially lacking.

As CCM says , against any opposition that are not total pushovers , he starts from the perspective that a draw would be a decent result , and , if they do manage a set piece goal to go 1-0 up then it is all about hanging on to that, so they drop deeper and deeper , '2 banks of four' etc , and if the opponents had not been in the game before that they soon will be as they are handed the initiative.

His approach would be fine for 'minnow' nations that rarely qualify and are liable to be thrashed if they do make it to the finals, but the furthest it would get them is the 1st knockout round and an 'honourable' (eg not humiliating) defeat. So the best he can do for England is to to get them to the point they have , infuriatingly, been stuck at for near 20 years.

England will fail at the world cup (if they get there) and people will say it was the players. But i doubt Brazil or Spain would get much further with Hodgson in charge.

on £3 million a year I think it' reasonable to expect an England manager to make necessary substitutions at the right time and to get players up for a World Cup qualifier. As you say biscuit there were many heads down in the second half at various times, I saw no animation from the sidelines from Hodgson, no tactical changes and no substitutions. Surely if players see what they are doing is not working on the pitch they expect the manager to come up with a fix from the sidelines, if it doesn't happen heads go down. You mention what he has at his disposal. The midfield was getting overrun and there was no ball out from the back even when they got it. From what I recall sat on the bench were Scott Parker, Frank Lampard, Ashley Young (for the majority of it) and Oxlade Chamberlain. If something is so obviously not working as it was the second half surely you chuck them on. I'm not over-estimating the quality, or lack of, in the England team however on this occasion Hodgson was at fault in my opinion. Of course the substitutions may not have worked but what we do know is what he left on the pitch definitely didn't and they were lucky to come away with a draw.

Its always the f***ing manager, if Del Bosque managed England he'd be accused of being tactically inept and the press would be taking the mickey out of his bushy tache. After the disaster of euro 2000 the Germans had a moratorium and came up with a plan, fund a progressive coaching system working with younger players, we blamed Kevin Keegan. They destroyed us in the World Cup with the products of their project we blamed Fabio. This recurring theme merely distracts us from identifying the real flaws in our system.

Well to a certain extent the FA knew what they were getting with Hodgson, certainly tactics/formation wise. Whether or not that turns out to do any good only time will tell. On this occasion it didn't work but instead of coming out and admitting they/he got it wrong they're defending it and saying a draw in Montenegro isn't that bad and that they came to the conclusion at the time there wasn't anything they could have done to change things on the pitch. But it hasn't just been the game in Montenegro, add to that the matches against Poland and the Ukraine. So instead of what appeared to be a straight forward group  there's now the possibility of the play-offs. Yes it's still in England's hands to win the group but is anyone really that confident?

No point in changing Hodgson but I'd rather be hearing something along the lines of we got it wrong second half and should have done this or that to change the game and do it next time. Simply doing nothing until the 77th was just bizarre.

but the current squad consists of all premiership players, admittedly not all regular starters, but they are at clubs like United, City, Chelsea, Arsenal, Tottenham etc. clubs that regularly get to the latter stages of European competition (ok maybe not City but that's work in progress ). I would expect them to be competing against the likes of Spain, Italy and Germany not struggling in a group consisting of Montenegro, Poland and Ukraine. Yje Montenegro squad for example consists of players from Videoton, Hapoel, Belgrade, Spartak Nalchik, Rudar Pljevla, Karpaty Lyiv, Amkar Perm, Dacia Chisinau ....hardly European powerhouses

When the pressure was on last night Milner made a decent challenge to concede a corner. The camera panned wider showing 7 or 8 England players in the box, all silent with their head down. No one encouraging, rallying etc.

Severe lack of characters at the top of the domestic game. They've all been coached to the nth degree, even down to miming the anthem and what to say in interviews.


None of this is false but again a top manager comes in and gets into the heads of the players...makes them 'run through brick walls' for him and each other.

Otherwise you might as well stick you and me as 1 and 2. With the same support staff behind us I assure you results and performances would not be that much different to what we are seeing now.

ROypist will no doubt post another pic of a young child in shorts as is his want

The point i was making is that whoever we get in as manager, it never works.

Firstly this is bullocks. I've given you examples where it was working and we were moving cohesively towards better and better teams...in both instances the managers were sacked for non 'football reasons'.

The subsequent mismanagement of who was appointed has no bearing on anything. For too long those in charge of appointing the manager went from one public whim to the other much like politics basically to appease....oh we are too dull/don't play with passion, ok appoint an attacking english coach...no we are too tactically naive...appoint a sophisticated foreigner and pay him the most in the world....no we need english...go get any english man Schteeevee..etc etc


The actual profile of the manager is less important than whether or not he's the right person. I actually thought Hodgson was a fairly average, ok, safe choice and I still do...the only difference between him and Sven and Capello is that he has a significantly worse group of players. With the 'golden generation' and his fairly basic style of management I have no doubt he'd have matched Sven's record. Given his experience the way he's handled the off field stuff and his communication skills are surprisingly bad but overall he's fairly average.

The point I'm making and will always make is to those who can't compute we've underperformed for years. 'We don't have good enough players' what a load of toss...for what? To beat the likes of poland, ukraine, morroco etc?! Course we bloody do. And when we are losing to the better sides you should be able to see some sort of style of play...some idea of long term thinking..some identity...not grimly holding on for pens in the hope we finally get lucky.

What next you ask?

If it were up to me, assuming we'd been knocked by all the premier english speaking elite managers (which is a very very short list, and you would expect to be knocked back but always worth trying), I'd give it back to a hoddle or a venables who has been there and done it and coming back into the job having seen all the pitfalls you would imagine would stand a much better chance of some sort of success.


I would genuinely rather give it to BIG SAM tomorrow than the status quo if he said ok I'm going to pick a front two of crouch and Lambert, two wingers two holding players, two attacking full backs, get the ball wide and get crosses in. Press hard and play at tempo. Form players will be picked even if it means going to the championship for a specialist skillset and every single player will have to want to kill for the shirt. I don't care who you are, this is not about picking the best 11 individuals, it's about the most efficient team. At the extreme if we became the international stoke it would represent progress to want we do at the moment...meandering with no identity whatsoever.

It would represent more of a game plan than we've had in years which says it all.