do these fucks never learn

Jack Rodwell insists England's players are on par with the Spanish team and thinks almost half of the senior squad could play for Barcelona.

He told reporters: "We might not have shown it the other night, but we do have players with excellent technical ability.

"You look at our senior side, we have some of the best players in the world.

"Gerrard, Lampard, Terry, Ferdinand, Rooney, the list goes on. If they were in the Barcelona squad I'm sure all of them would start.

need a compilation of english football indulging in ludicrous wish fulfillment imo

Don't worry, cos:

Marc Albrighton: "I think we're technically gifted, maybe not as much, but we've got the fight and the passion that overtakes that. I don't think many countries have got the passion and the hard work that England possess."

Never get tired of this one...

Stevie Me on Joe Cole: "Messi can do some amazing things, but anything he can do Joe can do as well, if not better. He used to shock us in training by doing footy tricks with a golf ball that most players can't even do with a football. I really fancy Joe for the [player of the year] award this season."

the passion and the hard work that England possess

the hard work will have been possessed

Q: Are you passionate about football?
A: I, and the rest of the English team, do possess some passion.

yeah yeah, we've done this

i'm not sure it's technical ability so much as technical thought. most of england's attacking players can trap a ball (lol heskey) but they don't always (in fact pretty rarely) trap it with intent, already moving in a considered or preparing for the next pass- as xavi, iniesta, modric do

― "It's far from 'lol' you were reared, boy" (darraghmac), Friday, 23 July 2010 15:03 (10 months ago) Bookmark

basically

they are generally technically inferior too

that's another topic covered elsewhere tho

Asked if Young deserves to be described in the same company as the Barcelona playmaker, and Manchester United's Cristiano Ronaldo, O'Neill replied: "Yes. In my opinion. I see a lot of games in Europe, I watch a lot of football, and you see a lot of players in the game who are very functional.

"Some are decent, some are more than decent and some are very, very good. And then you have the players who are absolutely exceptional. And Ashley Young is absolutely exceptional."

they are generally technically inferior too

― http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WhiteAmericanFolks.jpg (nakhchivan),

eyes read this three times and 'genetically inferior'

do think there is scope for a separate thread noting when british isles footballers claim technical parity with... well, anyone, i guess.

"Gerrard, Lampard, Terry, Ferdinand, Rooney, the list goes on. If they were in the Barcelona squad I'm sure all of them would start."

This quote to start the thread is all time. I refuse to accept Rodwell actually believes this. He just can't. HE CAN'T!!!

english footballers mostly pretty stupid so yeah he can

ferdinand might get a game...

lol at the rest.

bentley on the right

Yeah I would have made a case for Ferdinand up until about two years ago. He'd probably walk into the Barca team now. Maybe Rooney a year or two ago but not since they signed Villa. The others are lol.

You get the feeling the combined England-Barcelona XI would be ten England players plus Messi

Messi??? England have Joe Cole!!

Even the most mental England player would probably put in Busquets over Gareth Barry. Or try and convert Iniesta into a defensive midfielder.

Busquets is a cheat though. So's Alves. Iniesta and Puyol get respect though, they'd get shoehorned in there probably but not sure exactly where what with Rio/Terry, Lampard/Gerrard/Wilshere et al.

what makes me lol is there is one player in the england team i'd have over his barca counterpart in a heartbeat based on ability alone and he wasn't mentioned: ashley cole

            Valdes
Alves  Ferdinand  Terry  Abidal
    Gerrard  Xavi  Lampard  
     Rooney  Messi  Villa

I genuinely can't imagine how this team would operate

It wouldn't.

jesus ik wtf is that

Iniesta suffers from enough injuries that you could put Lampard Keita in there easily...

Hell I couldn't even finish that sentence.

Do Barca have a mascot? Rio could be on the pitch with his trademark merking style that way.

oic nm

Xavi would pass to Gerrard and stand there as if waiting for it to be passed back to him while Gerrard bombed forward and hoofed it over the bar.

Would be quite fun to see Alves make roughly 500 overlapping runs never to receive the ball from Gerrard tho.

and rightly so

Wd have johnson, richards and hutton over alves

valdes not much better than any of england's shit keepers mind you...

Valdes
Alves Pique Ferdinand Cole
Busquets Xavi Iniesta
Messi Villa Rooney

Would be alright. Being charitable to Rooney there, and I don't even think Valdes is that good. Maybe Joe Hart could make it depending on how he does in the Champions League next year.

Valdes has been ridiculously good for the past 2 seasons

Also Pedro >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Rooney

what makes me lol is there is one player in the england team i'd have over his barca counterpart in a heartbeat based on ability alone and he wasn't mentioned: ashley cole
--ladyboner (a hoy hoy)

totally

       james
alves  ferdinand  pique  rooney
            
   xavi   fabregas   iniesta
messi                    gerrard
            villa

i'm going to create this team tonight on fifa.

tbfttl rodwell seems fairly intelligent for an english footballer

i guess he is in the awkward position of answering leading qns from hacks

albrighton quote worse

the only english midfielder that could work at barca is huddlestone

foster

alves dann pique warnock

xavi gerrard lampard messi

rooney carroll

do think there is scope for a separate thread noting when british isles footballers claim technical parity with... well, anyone, i guess.

Not sure who these "British Isles Footballers" are... any of them not English?

fletcher >>>>>>> busquiets

uhm

no

Absolutely, have you ever seen him play for Scotland?

Absolutely, not as good as Busquets, in case there's any confusion there. Not even as good as Gary Caldwell when he plays for Scotland.

fletcher is pretty good but busquets is probably the best dmid around now

sandro, thudd, jenas

but busquiets is a dick

is there a reason u spel it like that

Of the other possible contenders, Real Madrid’s Carlo Ancelotti was passed over in favour of Pellegrini following Roberto Mancini’s sacking two years ago, and the style of football played by Diego Simeone’s Atlético Madrid is not considered cultured enough to match City’s aspirations.

Michael Owen is so Jealous types of person who have no any ability of being Punditry rather than talking what he is thinking that were not come from good thinking. He rather very shameless kinds of person I so ever known. I finally understood that, he is a fan of Arsenal foot ball club and a high want to play for this club when he has been player but we were not afforded him such opportunity and thus why he dislike this European best ever team the Gunners. We don't surprise we such kinds of jealous person for ever.

otm

"I have to give a lot of credit to Pochettino for sticking to them boys," he added. "A lot of other managers would have gone in there and said: 'no thank you, let’s give me some of them players who end in an i or an o from foreign countries who might not be as good as these young talents and I’ll play them instead.'

"But he hasn’t, he's stuck to the plan and I've got to give him a lot of credit for that."

he's trolling right? has to be

combination of self-aggrandizing, total lack of self-awareness, and i can only assume pished 24/7

he is the dictionary definition of "full of shit"

Given that virtually his first move as manager was to stick blood-of-St-George Englishman Nabil Bentaleb into the first team it's an odd one.

name ends with a consonant like a proper englishman

turkey, algeria, close enough m8 xp

St George was conceivably Moorish, right ah FUCK OFF RTC

st george big in ethiopia, st cyprian for algeria

she my map queen let her hit the banter

ah, for the halcyon days of Carlos Kickaball.

Queens Park Ranger’s Director of Football, Les Ferdinand, talks to 5 live sport’s Mark Pougatch about the club’s financial issues.

"Jermaine Jenas, who obviously you know extremely well and works a lot with us on the BBC, had this to say this week: 'During my time there, it was not being run as a Premier League club. For too long, the thinking was just to chuck money at the team. There has been no organisation, no vision, and no discipline in the way things were done.'"

"Sounds like a Premier League club doesn't it?"

"From now on, I'm going to focus on doing my talking on the pitch," he told Sky Sports News HQ. "As a footballer, you always get critics whether you're Ronaldo, Messi or myself. All you can do is answer your critics on the pitch."

Speaking to Sky Sports News HQ, the former England skipper said: “If Gareth had picked the squad he wanted to pick, we’d have won this tournament. With those players we would have beaten Italy last night and beaten the rest of them as well.”

50 years on. I hope there's not too much of this in the year ahead, ah hae ma doots *though

(*pron. θoʊ)

Maybe starting on the 4th Jan is a clue re: how much of this there is going to be

Norwich City have agreed a deal in principle with Everton for the £8m purchase of Steven Naismith having revived interest first expressed in the summer, though they face competition from a number of rival Premier League clubs to secure the Scotland international.

Allardyce has grown increasingly concerned at the lack of opportunities for British managers, something which has become a pet topic over the years, and he believes the situation has reached a stage where the authorities must act to level the playing field.

"The problem for me is we are denying British coaches positions in all divisions now, particularly in the top division and the Championship, and we need to do something about that.

"As a country, as the FA, as the Premier League, we need to protect the position of our own highly qualified coaches who are not even getting an interview now.

"What we could do is make sure that a British coach is interviewed for every position, a bit like the Rooney Rule."

lol

tony fernandes voluntarily adopts twp rule by giving token interview to andy hinchcliffe after haisselbaink's departure clears the way for some diversity

Couldn't find the appropriate thread but england 3 hungary 6 is up on YouTube in it's entirety. P great stuff and the pace of the play way quicker than I was expecting. Kenneth Wolstenholme on the commentary quite funny when he's bemused by the hungarians interchanging of positions "the outside left takes the throw on the right touchline (2minslater)the outside left still on the right side of the field for some reason". England not as technically lacking as I was expecting tbh.

downright rude of those hungarian rotters

literally the worst offside decision of all time against hungary after 10 minutes. should be 4-0 up

best moment so far just over 5 minutes in when mortensen gets knocked out cold and the hungarian players literally pick him up and dump him off the side of the pitch

hungary's 6th goal genuinely exquisite even by modern standards, and with that i yield

Next up, the 7-1 game?

CF 9 Bedford Jezzard

abysmal and great all at once

After the 3rd Hungary goal goes in there's a shell-shocked astonishment pervading Wembley. The nearest anologue is half-time at Germany-Brazil 2014, this sense that the best team in the world is giving the much-hyped home favorites a shellacking.

Quite fancy watching that later. I've read a lot about it - even paid money to get football nemesis on special order from the library a couple years ago - but have watched maybe a minute of footage.

Nandor Hidegkuti 4eva

mortensen getting knocked out at 45 minutes, not 5

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2016/jan/13/louis-van-gaal-paul-scholes-manchester-united-coaching-staff

Scholes as a coach (as opposed to a manager) is not the worst idea I've ever heard, even if the article itself is terrible.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3731977/I-d-hailed-foreign-boss-claims-Burnley-manager-Sean-Dyche.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/sean-dyche-wants-a-pizza-the-action-as-burnley-return-to-the-top-flight-a7181411.html

why didnt i get round to reading this bollocks through sooner. i'm crying

that's classic material

'go on Pep, tell us about your pizzas'

bbc radio pundit following interview with Woy: "you really hope he can get a job in this country as a Director of Football and not have to go to China or America or somewhere like that"

because it would suck to work in those place, of course

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-4114400/Darren-Fletcher-Manchester-United-illness-dream-West-Brom.html

'People talk about teams pressing but we did that first and then Barcelona took it on,' Fletcher explained.

'Before that in Spain it was, "You have it, we have it and then let's see who is best with it". But they saw what United did and realised that was the way to go.

'It's perfect. You don't even let the opposition have the chance to be in that lovely nice game. Barca eliminated that, but we did that first.'

Pep Guardiola has not had it all his own way at Manchester City and Fletcher's take on that and his belief in Pulis's methods are fascinating.

Fletcher said: 'I heard Guardiola speak about the English use of the 'second ball' and it was interesting. English teams recognise you can control a game without possession.

'Turning teams round, playing a ball up and not caring if you win the first ball but ensuring you win the second or third ball. That's unique to British football.

'I am not sure you get too many of those phrases in Spain, where your manager always talks about pass completion.

'That's why stats don't always work. There are times when I can play a pass that's not complete, but it's what this team needs.

'It can leave a good team facing its own goal. They have to put the ball out of play and then we have territory and a throw-in that we have worked at.

'So now the ball is in their area and we get a chance or a corner. We are progressing but I haven't completed a pass have I?

'So my stats are down but I have done my job.

'At Man City or Barcelona, your passing stats will be off the charts but you have to look at football with your eyes as well. A pass that goes five yards isn't always that dangerous, is it?'

To listen to the way Fletcher has broadened his understanding in two years is intriguing. He has designs on coaching and keeps thoughts and ideas in a notebook.

christ help us all

Fletcher is hardly that likeable is he? Suppose anyone looks good in comparison to Busquets. He was also pretty crap last season even before his mysterious virus

― Number None, Thursday, 16 June 2011 14:34 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i kinda like him

― http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WhiteAmericanFolks.jpg (nakhchivan), Thursday, 16 June 2011 14:47 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

makes the most of his talents

― http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WhiteAmericanFolks.jpg (nakhchivan), Thursday, 16 June 2011 14:47 Bookmark

Posted at 20:15
Post update
Newcastle 3-0 Rochdale

In all seriousness Rochdale play some lovely football on the eye and should be applauded for it, I guess. You don't concede goals like that under Keith Curle though.

it's proving a poor night for lower-league goalies thinking they're iniesta, that's all

nothing wrong with passing it around the back if you have personnel who can handle it

lower league goalies thinking they're iniesta are tempting fate. before they know it they'll find themselves growing grapes, sending their quids on running a bodega in sussex, until one day the sky cracks open, death reigneth and a voice from above booms: 'you're trying to make wine in england ffs, what did you expect other than excrutiating pain and unending suffering, mortal?'

:D

like nigel blackwell himself

I'll take it!

it's proving a poor night for lower-league goalies thinking they're iniesta, that's all

nothing wrong with passing it around the back if you have personnel who can handle it

Did you see the Bournemouth game at the weekend?

that guy is a lower-league goalie making his three or four career EPL appearances tbf