*Official* English Football Season 2014-15

[Ikki]

Rooney was one of the best players at that Euros. Not for us, but as a whole,

I'm not going to dig deep into why Scholes retired because hey, me and Halsey will just wind up boring the **** off everyone for 4 pages, but if he retired because he played a position that wasn't his best, then **** him anyway.

for all the stick Gerrard gets for his England career, it's fair to say he seldom played his best positions for us.

I think more than not playing him in his best positions, he was never given the torch or the trust to have the team built around him.

I also think England have been a bit unlucky. In 2004 and 2006 England lost on penalties...anyone can lose on penalties. They go through, you never know what could happen. I think in 2010 if that Lampard goal counts and England pull it back to 2-2, all the momentum swings in England's favour, and while Germany were incredibly talented, they were very young. I think their relative inexperience cost them against Italy 2 years later.

Gerrard aside; you had a generation of Rio, Terry, Cole, Lampard, Gerrard, Scholes, Rooney and even Owen... they should have won something, it's a great shame that they never had the right manager IMO. The FA truly ****ed it up. Imagine if they had given that team to a Hiddink or something. Instead, it's been backward and conservative for more than a decade.

 

[Eds]

Reckon a 3-5-2/5-3-2 would've suited England well circa 2004. Particularly if Woodgate & King weren't so permanently crock. Good starting options and plenty of strong replacements in pretty much every position, too.

 

[sledger]

I think they similar systems a few times, but they never really worked due to needing to play Beckham on the right.

 

[Uppercut]

Beckham would have made a phenomenal wing-back surely? Provided you could ensure he kept his position, which I suppose was always the problem for England. But he was basically an extremely fit guy who was exceptional at crossing and set pieces but not much else, so you'd think he was perfect for that role.

In any case England couldn't have played 3-5-2 in 2004. None of the club sides played it, their players weren't at all tactically adaptable, and it was totally out of fashion in general because CBs weren't good enough on the ball to carry three in one team.

 

[grecian]

Beckham would have made a phenomenal wing-back surely? Provided you could ensure he kept his position, which I suppose was always the problem for England. But he was basically an extremely fit guy who was exceptional at crossing and set pieces but not much else, so you'd think he was perfect for that role.

In any case England couldn't have played 3-5-2 in 2004. None of the club sides played it, their players weren't at all tactically adaptable, and it was totally out of fashion in general because CBs weren't good enough on the ball to carry three in one team.

That's what Beckham played under Hoddle wasn't it?

 

[sledger]

Beckham would have made a phenomenal wing-back surely? Provided you could ensure he kept his position, which I suppose was always the problem for England. But he was basically an extremely fit guy who was exceptional at crossing and set pieces but not much else, so you'd think he was perfect for that role.

In any case England couldn't have played 3-5-2 in 2004. None of the club sides played it, their players weren't at all tactically adaptable, and it was totally out of fashion in general because CBs weren't good enough on the ball to carry three in one team.

Dunno, lack of real pace/mobility/the idea at the time that wing backs basically just had to be normal defenders playing slightly further forward probably did for him so far as any chance of playing in that sort of role was concerned. That certainly seemed to be the view of the powers that be at the time anyway; in the games where England did deploy that sort of system Beckham was always made to play centrally.

 

[Uppercut]

I'm not sure whether Beckham could have been described as immobile in 2004. At some point he turned from a dynamic, box-to-box wide midfielder to an undisciplined luxury and I forget whether it was around then or a little bit earlier.

But like I said, 3-5-2 was out of the question by 2004 anyway.

 

[The Sean]

Sky reporting Rodriguez to Real done - £63m.

Real saw the shiny new toy, stamped their feet and got what they wanted.

 

[sledger]

I'm not sure whether Beckham could have been described as immobile in 2004. At some point he turned from a dynamic, box-to-box wide midfielder to an undisciplined luxury and I forget whether it was around then or a little bit earlier.

But like I said, 3-5-2 was out of the question by 2004 anyway.

Yeah, I didn't mean to describe him as immobile. He was a decent athlete and all, he just never really possessed the high level of agility I'd tend to associate with players who play in that position.

 

[GIMH]

Pretty sure we played 3-5-2 in a few qualifiers for the 06 WC but with Beckham as a holding midfielder

Including when we lost to NI

I could be making this up

 

[sledger]

Yeah, it was definitely used at least on a handful of occasions.

It was also used in that game where Robinson air-kicked against Croatia in the Euro 2008 qualifiers, though I don't think Beckham played in that one. Jamie Carragher was played as the left wing back in that game. Deary me.

 

[sledger]

Lionel Messi sounded out ARSENAL transfer prior to signing new deal at Barcelona | Mail Online

Haha, hmmmm....

 

[Tom Halsey]

5-3-2/3-5-2 seems like it was far more in vogue 10 years ago than it was now until the World Cup. Several teams played it at the World Cup, but until then I hadn't seen the formation in about a decade. It seems to me far from ridiculous that England might have played it in 2004.

Even Ferguson made use of it at United in the mid to late 90s. Keane played as the third centre back at times.

 

[Cabinet96]

Who was the last side to do well in the Champions League playing it? Almost a complete absence of it in England, Spain and Germany and Juve's last two CL campaigns make me a bit suspect about how good it is.

 

[sledger]

Talking of formations in very rigid terms isn't especially helpful for mine. It's more about the jobs and specific tasks given to individual players, how well they can do them, and how well they fit in with the other players around them.

 

[Cabinet96]

But the same Juve players who have struggled in the CL playing 3-5-2 have dominated Serie A with it, which makes me think that most sides are equipped to deal with it well, regardless of the individual players.

Not sure it really suits a fast paced league to only have two wide men tbh.

 

[Uppercut]

That's far too much of a generalisation. Wigan dicked on everyone by switching to it for the last few months of the season in 2012.

 

[sledger]

But the same Juve players who have struggled in the CL playing 3-5-2 have dominated Serie A with it, which makes me think that most sides are equipped to deal with it well, regardless of the individual players.

Not sure it really suits a fast paced league to only have two wide men tbh.

Yeah, but the thing with blanket writing off of a formation like that fails to take into account the details of how different teams deploy that sort of system. There's a drastic difference between the 3-5-2 Juve use, and the one that Wigan used to use a few years back (no idea if they're still using it) for instance.

There may be huge differences, for instance, in terms of the way players for different teams operate from within what, on paper at least, seems a very similar formation. To use another Tim Vickery-ism, a team playing with a wing back will look very different from a team with players that play from a wing back position.

You may be right, and 3-5-2 might have its limitations, it's certainly not a very popular choice in any case, but I think accrediting a team's success/failure in a substantial way to the formation they play can often obsure the facts and just lead to generalisations. Whilst some formations are thought to be very limited in the present day (i.e. 4-4-2), I think there's a tendancy amongst people, from casual fans all the way up to pundits etc.., to just chalk up failures and so on to formations without actually looking behind how they work.

Edit: Ha, beaten to it by Uppercut.

 

[sledger]

Another thing that bugs me is that people seem to think that players line up on the field exactly as they are shown on the Sky/BBC graphic that shows a team lineup at the beginning of a game. It's like they think a player who's shown on lining up on the left wing physically can't drift inside, or that a supposedly central player can't go out wide. I honestly would rather just see a list of names at the start of a game, as it's very rare that a team truly spends large portions of a match lining up anything like a supposed picture of their formation looks like, but yet people seem to think that X team MUST be playing 4-5-1 or whatever, because Gary and the Jamies say so. It's as if people actually believe the coaches and managers of teams actually hand in a copy of their strategies along with the team sheet before every match.

 

[Pothas]

Yeah there are very different ways of playing with 3 at the back, Barca did it a fair bit under Pep of course but that was never described as a 3-5-2.