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Plus that penalty.
A propos of nothing, my daughter did exactly the same in her side's penalty shoot out at the end of their semi final yesterday. Sadly, the keeper was too immobile to move either way and was pleasantly suprised to see the ball coming staright at her. At least my daughter didn't try a Panenka, I suppose. Anyway, you'll be pleased to hear that the rest of her side thought it might be a good idea to put the ball in the corner, so it all ended well.
Smudger replacing Lineker at Euro 92 as well.
Yes, that was a shocker. As if Lineker's only partial involvement in the game thus far had any bearing whatsover on who you'd want a half-chance to fall to. I suppose it's the earlier ones that stick with you, and some of us are still scarred by 1970 and 1973.
I'm just a wee bit too young to recall the Ramsey/Revie eras, but Taylor taking off Lineker for Alan Smith (and I dearly love Smudger), ignoring the tyro Shearer in the process, when we needed to score v yer Swedes in Euro 92 would probably get my vote for arse sub decisions.
To be fair, that was out of the box thinking for Taylor, for whom an inspirational team talk utilised the phrase "come on".
I think I'd add that we had looked completely incapable of creating a half chance anyway, so I think the idea was to start hitting long balls to Smudge. I don't actually think it was as stupid as it seemed.
Bah. Giving Lineker someone to play off would have been a better bet. As it was, his partners up front were the wide players Sinton and Daley.
Hence why I very much don't think there's too much of a 'what if' with the England '92 Euro team. There's a lot more to be said about what happened with the 2002/2004 and 2006. For the first, it was how the hell did we not go for it v 10 men, for 2004, that was when we did have it in us to go toe to toe with them. 2006, it is a general why oh why did we play like a 1970s traditional hoof ball team?
Yeah, we were never very likely to win the 1992 Euros even we had seen off Sweden. But Sweden were beatable, even on their own patch. We'd gone one up and, reading about it this morning, I was reminded Daley had missed a good chances to put us two up. And Taylor of all people should have known that Lineker was capable of scoring a vital goal after doing nothing of note as that's exactly what he did in the vital qualifier in Poland a few months previously.
Didn't know the Voltman was such a good footballer.
Truly a man of many talents.
2006 we were inspid the whole time. The whole thing was a shambles. Given Owen’s injuries and Rooney’s foot we weren’t going to win it I guess. Had both of them been fit we could definitely have challenged but announcing Sven’s departure before the tournament, having his successor in the coaching team for it, just everything about it was wrong.
Oh they were beatable although I recall that England didn't beat Sweden for about 30 or more years in any sort of match. I think it was only in a friendly in 2011 that we broke that curse and then beat them in Euro 2012, that I remember more for Ibrahimovic strolling past John Terry for fun in a rather erratic game.
England's Euro 92 squad is weird as **** when you look at the World Cup squad and the Euro 96 squads, both of which are full of genuine quality.
