Yes but we had home advantage which helped us win our group, it all seems a flawed system TBH.England got an easier geographical route because we won our group. Obviously semis and final we would always have been home had we made it but had we drawn with the Czechs, our journey would have been Budapest, Baku, London.
I remembered this when I saw last night's Copa America result. As an Englishman one's instinctively anti anything Argentinian on general principle, but did afford myself a slight chuckle.
Is Liam being serious or sarcastic here?
Pen's are great excitement to be fair.It has been a tremoundously fun tournament and has reinvigorated my interest in watching football.
****ing hate penalty shoot outs though, especially in the final. Always feels like a cheap and unsatisfactory result to me at the end of a month long tournament. Not sure there’s any other better way though.
WaaaaahImagine how sad you’d have to be to change your avatar to the winners after your team has never yet advanced from the knockouts of ****ing anything
For me it feels like a drawn MMA match having an arm wrestling contest at the end to decide the winner.Pen's are great excitement to be fair.
Takes a serious amount of skill and courage to score them with so much on the line.
Credit to Donnarumma tonight.
Thinking about the penalty choices.....I don't think its as terrible as twitter are saying. Rashford regularly takes them for Utd and was unlucky, Sancho has a good record for Dortmund,,,maybe the last penalty should have been someone else? But one bad call really. Sterling has a so-so record with City lets not forget.
I'd argue Southgate deserves more criticism for letting the game drift after such a bright start, Italy are top, but the were their for the taking tonight.
But back in those days, knock out matches were rarely drawn, so it was kind of academic anyway. Maybe teams are much fitter nowadays. Without checking, there was that drawn semi-final in the 1968 euros that was decided on the toss of a coin, and replays were used to sort out the group stage once or twice in the WC. And thinking about it, here were one or two in the 1930s WCs when they didn't have a group stage and just played knock-outs from the start. The obvious problem until the final is fitting the replay before the next round. Perhaps playing it the very next day so the winner still has a few days to recover before the next round would work. Replaying a drawn final does make sense though.Now that I think about it, it's very weird that replays used to be standard and now they're almost unthinkable. They're infinitely superior to a penalty shoot-out in a sporting sense, and they'd surely make far more money for everyone involved too.
I read a theory on reddit that it was foreign accounts and bots who made those posts and true English fans would never do it.I know I shouldn't be surprised by this, but the three lads who missed their penalties have been subjected to the usual torrent of racist abuse on 'social' (surely that's the wrong term) media. Is it really to hard to trace these morons and throw the book at them?
There was a crushing sense of inevitability about that, yeah.I know I shouldn't be surprised by this, but the three lads who missed their penalties have been subjected to the usual torrent of racist abuse on 'social' (surely that's the wrong term) media. Is it really to hard to trace these morons and throw the book at them?
I suppose that's something, if it is the case.I read a theory on reddit that it was foreign accounts and bots who made those posts and true English fans would never do it.