England v Croatia positive vibes thread

[sawmiller]

Did Sweden not beat Italy to get to Russia? If so, no pushovers whatsoever

[rolymiller]

Fair enough about Sweden gents but what Im trying to say is we need to test ourselves against several good teams as regularly as we can in my opinion. We need to learn to cope when under the cosh. Its summat the millers need to learn to do next season if we are to do better. At least we will have 46 games to try to learn how to do it against tough opposition.

[sawmiller]

roly - fair point fella - we need to keep testing our squad, but not to throw them in the deep end too much, otherwise that can demoralise young players. Next Euros will be a test as well

[Hazza Has A Gazza]

Fair enough about Sweden gents but what Im trying to say is we need to test ourselves against several good teams as regularly as we can in my opinion.

Nations league. We are in the A league, amongst the best teams in Europe. You're right, it's hard to get the big game experience we need when we play teams like Malta, Azerbaijan, San Marino etc in qualifiers. We mostly play against teams who put 11 players behind the ball and that's what we're used to. We do well against those teams, but against teams who have the quality to attack us and break through us, we struggle and always have done.

Anyway, gutted tonight. everyone seems to think we will grow from this and be better for it, but so will the likes of Spain, Germany, Brazil, Holland, Italy. We didn't exactly kick on after 1990, in fact we went backwards. Never will we have a better chance to win a tournament and we've blown it. Still, I would have been happy just to reach the quarter finals before we kicked off.
All we can do is just hope that these players CAN improve and go forward.

[CAMiller]

I wouldn't say we've blown it but it just goes to show how hard it is to win these things. In retrospect, since '66 we've made the last 4 twice in 13 attempts (10 if you only count the actual times we made the finals). In that same time period the Millers have only actually won their league twice in 52 attempts and been close (got promotion) on 7 other occasions. They call it character building

My daughter is 24 next month and at least in her lifetime we've never failed to qualify and suffer the pain of '74, '78 and '94