It was do or die for England yesterday and Fabio Capello’s men fell flat on their faces. With the whole nation behind the Three Lions and some misplaced confidence that they could do the job against the Germans, we went into the match thinking that England might just pull it off. But how wrong we were. When Steven Gerrard and co needed to up their level of performance they went in the opposite direction and made sure that the 2010 World Cup will be one to forget for England fans.
Westwood got it spot on in his latest World Cup blog when he said: “We think we’re better than we are actually are,” and no matter how good you thought England were before they kicked off yesterday, they certainly didn’t reach any sort of acceptable level. The relief that was felt across the nation after the Slovenia match turned into one of embarrassment and utter disappointment after 90 minutes of being out-classed by a young German side.
Any theories that that qualifying for the knockout stages would bring the team together were quickly thrown out of the window. The Big Dawg reckoned that Wayne Rooney had no choice but to come good, however that certainly didn’t happen and talk of Wazza being one of the World Cup’s shining lights before the tournament started didn’t come to fruition. Will people let him and the rest of the England boys forget it when the new Premier League season starts? We’ll have to wait and see.
It’s definitely an unforgiving time right now and it’ll be interesting to see with whom the ultimate blame lays, the players or the manager? Whoever is to blame, the emotion of winning is what the nation needed but England just didn’t deliver. There’s no way of getting away from that and this is a missed opportunity that the players and the nation will look back on and rue in years to come. Westwood reckoned that we could have beaten Germany, Argentina, Brazil and then Spain in the final, but we couldn’t even manage to make it to the quarters, let alone the final!
To read Tim Westwood’s third World Cup article in full head to the News of the World website:
http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/sport/858315/THE-EMOTION-OF-WINNING-IS-WHAT-NATION-NEEDS.html
