Liam has a great future behind him
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I’d say it’s literally his leadership and presence in the camp. They’re playing the clip of Henderson against Croatia there on Twitter the whole time. The one where he’s just kicking it away.
I’d agree Wharton is a more valuable profile than Anderson for elite football. He is a pure playmaker, deep lying progressive passer in the Pirlo mould. They would say he hasn’t the physicality of Anderson, but Wharton’s defensive positional awareness will only increase over time and that will compensate.
Anderson is fantastic, but a bit like Bruno Fernandes in that deeper role, he’ll take too many touches at the wrong times and too few at the right times whereas Wharton is just very natural back there and always looks to play forward.
Wharton suffers for being English a bit, he plays like a continental player. Manchester United should move on him really. I actually think he should be going ahead of Mainoo, who while he protects the ball well, is positionally all over the place.
He’ll be trundling up and down the left side for Ireland I’d say. At International qualification level though, let’s not kid ourselves, he’d do wreck.
Fuck him.
I think we should all get behind our close neighbours England for this. It seems they’ve been harshly done over the years. I just listened to a podcast that was positing that the CIA were involved in poisoning Gordon Banks during the 1970 world cup in order to curry favor with the dictatorship in Brazil.
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Deccie Rice vice captain. By God.
I hope the BBC do a feature from the England camp called “Miami Rice” featuring the theme tune of Miami Vice.
I think this is going to be back to the godhelpus England. An early exit, Round 1 or 2.
Surely they won’t go out in the first round. A good 11 from TFK would get through the first round…
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That’s a tough group
Ah they’ll breeze through the group stages and have a better coach in Thomas Tuchel this time but if Norway finish 3rd in the group behind France and Senegal then they’d be a very tricky Round of 32 proposition. Mexico in the Azteca would an iconic but daunting enough Round of 16 tie. One they should win on paper but wrought with danger. If results go along expected lines then I just can’t see them beating Brazil, Argentina and France or Spain in 3 consecutive games over the course of 10 days or less. It’s simply not doable.
TBH I found the tournaments between 2008-2016 to be lacking something when they weren’t going well. When we’re unfortunately not there ourselves then you need a dramatic English exit in the latter stages to copperfasten a memorable tournament. The defeats against Portugal at Euro 2004, Croatia 2018 and Italy 2021 were just iconic association football nights. You need to feel the fear of them going close to winning it to have the relief of it not happening at the end.
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I don’t rate Teuchel.
We shall see
No love for Scotland then ?.
Am I right in thinking they’ve never gotten past the initial group stages in whatever number of tournaments they’ve been to….
I remember this particular moment as for a while I thought it was on but……
Not a single one. They’ll fail this time too.
England would have qualified then in '96 if they’d bothered to hold Holland at 4-0, but they did not.
The Scots should have ditched the English in the 2014 independence referendum for that alone, but the Scotch, like their football teams in finals tournaments group stages always do, baulked.
Buzzin
