The Poolie Bunker

Predictions anyone?

1-1 extra time and pens to decide the match!

Brilliant.

Mind you…the first jet had French markings.

I think there'll be some tasty tackles with a few cards shown and at least 1 sending off.
I'm also predicting glorious failure for England because I'm always wrong.

We had no intentions of going for a 2nd goal which was ultimately our downfall against a team like that.

Cant blame the ref, Argies were the better side. They knew how to cross the ball and generally their players were better on the ball. Touchel has done well but ultimately not able to get us over the line. I am no tactician but why did we give up all attacking ideas, once we scored? Obviously they were going to come at us and they are better than Mexico. Ah, well....another chapter in the England book of glorious failure.

As we saw all last season, sitting back on a 1 goal lead for 30+ minutes is a bad idea.

I absolutely cant abide Southgate but at the end of the day, Touchal was no better.

Pools under Featherstone without the blue stripes

Kane is one of the best finishers in world football and they provided him with nothing again.
I thought they looked average until we invited them onto us.

Edited for accuracy

Southgate all over again which is particularly disappointing cos a lot of us thought Touchel had much better football tactical nous. Turns out this is not the case. Still, silver lining is we wont get our arses handed to us by Spain. I am praying Spain beat Argentina because I cant stand them or Messi.

Is this a good summary of the England performances,
https://youtu.be/0StzSKnOS2A?si=u0NgcBibD4KVgj6u

Sounds about right, he got it totally wrong. It was 11 against 11, it wasn’t the Azteca, they were there for the taking.

Semi final of the World Cup against the reigning world champions and he opts for national league decision making.

Possibly the most embarrassing decisions he’s made.

He’s obviously not the messiah he’s just a very naughty boy.

As soon as he brought the 2 defenders on I said we'd get beat.

After the Mexico game I joked on here 'Was he Nicky Featherstone in disguise?'

Turns out he was

Absolute stupidity.

when decisions work the manager would be hailed a tactical genious. its only very small margins that make them look fools. at least the nation can get back to normal now and people can put away their faux interest in football till the euro,s. only one team can wwin the thing but england did better than germany, brazil or italy who could not qualify.

I agree Accrington. When England play everyone and his proverbial dog becomes an expert, and it’s annoying.

Did Tuchel start making defensive changes because he saw the England team freeze? In his PMI he suggests he did. Did England freeze because they were tired? Argentina certainly had more zip about them.

It’s easy to criticise but as a long term fan I’ve seen far worse.

its only failure if you only look at winning the world cup is the only sign of real success. Only one team can win the thing but others can have had a decent world cup. being the 3rd or 4th best team in the world aint shabby and is far better than anybody but two of the teams who started from th qualifying spots onwards.

YUP. Losing 2-1 in a World Cup Semi-final isn't "failure".

Looking at the bigger picture, getting to the 3rd place play off is not a failure at all.
However the way England played after going 1-0 up was a failure indeed.

This says it all !!!

Pot kettle Accy, you talking about people showing faux interest in the World Cup

Did you stick to your boast here at the start of the tournament: "Anybody out there interested. Must be the quietest on record with no extra flags about... Mind you it suits me as i never watched a single minute live four years back and will not be changing this time around."

For somebody who never watches a single minute you've had plenty to say at every point in England's journey.

And it's easy to be philosophical about a defeat when you don't give a toss about the result.

At the end of the day Tuchel picked the squad with some say players left out who should have been selected, he does the tactics, apparently got it wrong albeit a very experienced manager on mega bucks, he must have watched Argentina loads of times and identified where the danger was going to come from, Messi, should he be sacked, some are already crying for his head ?
From what i have read on MSM, I also watched the highlights, Argentina kicked the sh** out of England early doors then realised if we play football we can beat England, could quite easily have been 4 or 5 goals for them if not for Pickford and the posts.

The Argentinians were allowed 20 minutes target practice…simple as that…and the law of averages obliged them as it frequently does.

Which came first?

A) England players shrink, tire, choke, lose impetus. Manager acts to shore up defence.

B) Manager acts to shore up defence. England players shrink, tire, choke, lose impetus.

No surprise that Argentina came back strongly after they went behind. Tuchel had the perfect opportunity to press the reset button during the second hydration break - as loads of coaches have done throughout this world cup - and his masterstroke was taking Gordon off for a defender.

That literally left England with no out ball, no fresh pair of legs to run at the opposition defence and drag the team forward. Rashford comes on in the 96th minute? Seriously?

I'd have gone with Madueke - his pace would have terrified them. Even though he's a bit of a headless chicken he'd have been winning free kicks, throw ins and corners in their half of the pitch.

The fact that we had to get a foreign manager to manage England says it all.
Yes we have had foreign coaches before but surely an Englishman through and through should be managing our national team?!?!

It has become a highly paid job instead and in my opinion you need to be from the nation to manage the nation.
You must bleed the blood of an Englishman and I am afraid a German does not!

England lost that game last night as the midfield totally collapsed, you have to win the midfield battle, we lack the nasty chewy aggressive type player in there, the type Argentina, Italy and Brazil have had in the past when winning it, when we won in 66 Ball and Stiles were that type of player, as were our fullbacks tbh (Wilson and Cohen), Argentina were able to put crosses in at will and it was one way traffic, you need to cut out the supply, England couldn't get hold of the ball and retain it at all, good sides do that when leading, Rice miss kicked a simple pass just before half time and Argentina had the ball for the next ten minutes, you can't afford to make those mistakes at this level.

If we had been comfortably beaten 3-0 or similiar, i think we would have been justified in saying ah well, we did ok to get to the semi finals. But the point is we surrendered by by trying to defend for half an hour against the reigning world champions....we threw it away...we allowed ourselves to be beaten....we did not go down fighting which is why last night was an abject failure. If he had kept Gordon on and brought on some fresh legs in midfield/attack the result could have been different, not guaranteed of course, we may still have lost but would not have been so pathetic. With Touchal as boss, most of us thought those miserable defensive displays ( Euro final v italy, World Cup semis v Croatia, Euro Final v Spain) were a thing of the past, turns out Touchal is just another Southgate but without the wokeness. It is a deeply disappointing outcome and the implications resonate far more than the result itself. An absolute sickener.

So you want an England team to be full of players that "look English" (as you've said many times before) and an Englishman as manager.....

name your squad and manager based on your criteria.....

Sometimes you have to gamble to win a game of Football.

The gamble should of been to keep attacking for the last 30 minutes.
Not gamble on defending for the last 30 minutes..

Suicidal tactics from the manager which everyone more or less knew we weren't going to hold out.


Not as gutted as I thought it would be because after minute 60 I knew what was Gunna happen.

Ah well I'm still optimistic that Pools will hit the top 7.

Just waiting for the tickets to go on sale for the Barrow match.

UTP.

Messi looked totally deflated when England took the lead, they should have kept playing the same style as they had been doing rather than going for all out defence. We didn't have any attacking threat at all after Gordon went off and after the equaliser there was an inevitable-ness they they'd go on and win it.
Shocking substitutions, tactics, and negativity cost us a place in the final because they were hardly causing any problems until we parked the bus.

England now have to regroup for the UEFA games in October and November, Spain, Croatia & The Czech Republic.

How ironic that the final is Spain (who want Gibraltar back from us) versus Argentina (who want the Falklands back from us), surely it's better we give them both back, with huge reperations, and an offer to cut the grass for them too in the summer months....Ooh I felt dizzy there , came all over woke and left wing.

Starmers final insult a peerage for Sadiq Khan

,

I wonder who’s after the Isle of Wight.

From when we scored in the 55th minute to the substitutions in the 72nd minute we had 12% possession. They were battering us. I think Tuchel tried to shore it up but it didn’t work.

The nature of the defeat was just so disappointing. I just wanted them to have a right go at them and if we got beat, so be it.

Are we the best team in the world, no. Are we the best team in Europe, no.
Maybe quarter / semi finals are our ceiling?

didn,t watch a single minute or the highlights. like many things in the news you do not need to have witnessed the event to have an opinion on it especially when the news is concentrate on it. only going on about the interest around me [re tournament and on the news. you would not have realise something football related was happening the other side of the atlantic. as for defeat i,ll also not be rushing to take the happy pills if pools miss out on promotion next seaaon if they give it a go and are not robbed like before at cardiff.

more or less you are saying best form of defence is attack. doubt we,ll see that in the national league next season either with teams shoring up their defence in the last 20 minutes sitting on a single goal lead. not just our league but the rest of football also. how many equaliserers do you see in the last few minutes, but that tactic seems written in stone in football.

I think there needs to be a balance.

Sitting back for 30 minutes against the world champions was never going to end well.

We had no out ball. Soon as we had any form of clearance we couldn’t keep hold of the ball and they just kept coming back and applying pressure.

i completely agree with you but i doubt the majority of todays safety first coaches will do. we saw it on steroids last season where the team was sent out not to lose with a win being a sort of bonus its a stats driven game now so i guess we,ll see more of the tuchel one next season with shutting up shop with the dreaded time wasting on top.

It’s history now, but surprising how many big names went out early.

Yes the best form of defence is attack but when your substitutes are defenders it’s not going to work, I watched one clip where Pickford near the end advanced to nearly the half way line and launched the ball forwar. hit and hope football. The ball should have been going out wide with crosses going into the box.

If the England team was represented by 11 white men, it would cause an uproar, if it were 11 black men instead, it would cause a celebration!

Talking absolute fucking bollocks as usual Stocksfield.

The vast majority of England fans want the manager to pick the best 11 England-qualified players available. Always easier said than done - what were the likes of Henderson (past it) or James (unfit) even doing in the squad is the sort of question most of us are asking.

I'm not talking bollocks!

Take this for example:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/20 ... -diversity

https://www.skysports.com/football/news ... s-football

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/56124688

And there is more!

So if we were to pick the best 11 and they happened to be all white, there is uproar!!!
That was my point!

Matter of opinion of the squad he took to the USA, England needed holding players in the midfield against Argentina but they were left at home. Scholes take on Englands midfield,
https://youtube.com/shorts/N9CzyNl_k2U? ... vgfWyqCAnX

but the uproar always seems to come from one group and its not the asian one. must be terrible living a life with a sack of king edwards on your shoulder. they are the only poor and deprived group in there eyes where white and brownie all drive around in range rover. funny how this does not happen in female athletics thats not team orientated. if pools had a team of 11 black trannies who won us promotion i could not give a damn and i doubt i.d be on my own. if we has an all white team i,d feel the same also.

4 year old articles about women's football. Wow, yes. There's definitely no bollocks there

This drive for diversity is totally ridiculous, less than 4% of the women in the UK are black and therefore proportionally you'd expect about half a player in the team to be black. Having 3 or 4 black players shows that they're massively overrepresented. Which surely shows that if you're good enough, race, ethnicity, religion mean feck all?

There should be no drive for anything…just the best person for the job regardless of their ethnicity.