Whats next?
A game against a 2nd placed team from the 3rd level?
Azaz held up plenty of ball that we badly needed when he came on.
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England in Wembley on Sunday
Ronnie giving motm to Kelleher for 2 saves. Love Kelleher but Collins was clearly irelands best player tonight
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Kosovo, Slovakia, Bulgaria or amazingly the Faroe Islands as it stands.
Unfortunately our chances of 2nd are gone after England picked up a result in Athens tonight.
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Just on the way back from the Aviva, fuck that was bad. An extremely average team could and should have got 3 or 4. So open. We will get an awful hiding on Sunday.
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Knight is suspended for Sunday.
Mad dog Molumby will be back in the engine room.
No Rice or Grealish to boot unfortunately.
He’s presenting the highlights on Virgin Media now.
Nap to be booked
We’ll do England
That was the best pen save I’ve ever seen. I’m still not over it.
Both wins against Finland have been quite lucky. Not convinced we’ve turned a corner. We look better going forward but wide open in midfield
Yeah, agree with that assessment. Just defended really deep when out of possession and let them play around us. England could absolutely rip us apart. Finlands XG was 1.98, we were .95, as a home team.
Ah lads, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We’ve spent 4or 5 years being very good at losing games we should have won/drawn. Yiz are pißing and moaning now that we won a game we might not have. We’ll get beaten on sunday but we’ll have good spirit and belief in the camp going forward.
Also, their centre forward was hilarious, he looked like a lad runming on fumes for the over 35s.
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+1. There are levels now & the gaps between the elite like England & the rest is getting bigger. But Finland are around our standard & we bate them twice in a month - once deservedly & tonight quite fortunately - but two wins are good for the confidence & the vibes. There are also some positive signs in terms of performance but certainly plenty of areas to improve on too. Overall they look to be playing with a decent attitude and more conviction despite the limitations & I would be inclined to accentuate the positives rather than hone in on negatives.
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Checked to here for the fooley meltdown.
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I’m no expert on xg but from my football manager online experience a penalty is worth close to 1.0 xg regardless of outcome so would skew the numbers a bit
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England are in lazy mode with half the team away. No interest I’d say until the new man comes in.
Could be wort a pot on a draw?
If this point is true then the Nations League could be viewed as an association football version of the damaging effects that developed from the NFL being split into Div 1-4 rather than the old 1A/2A and 1B/2B.
I’m not so sure that the gap is widening though. The days of Germany hammering San Marino 14-0 or even ourselves beating Gibraltar 7-0 seem to be a thing of the past. International tournaments are generally refreshing because they’re more open than the ring fenced club game. Denmark and Wales reaching recent Euros semi-finals or Saudi Arabia beating Argentina would be classic examples of that. A limited Australian team gave the eventual World champions bags of it in the knockout rounds at the last tournament. Even under the hapless Stephen Kenny I think we only lost one qualifier by more than a goal (2-0 defeat away to France in 2023).