ceefax the cat

"You need a lot of luck to win tournaments" ≠ "Winning tournaments is purely a matter of luck" It's not complicated, really. Surely you can do better than this

It should be heels of boots, because it's relatively straightforward to put sensors in the heels of boots + that's a better guide as to where body / legs are. It also takes foot size out of the equation - if that Danish chap had small feet he'd have been on, which is insane. The heels of both boots should need to be clear of both the defender's heels to be offside, so that if you're basically occupying the same lateral space as the defender, you've timed your run to perfection and will almost certainly be given on because your trailing foot will be behind their front foot. That would align with most people's instinctive idea of what is and isn't offside. Nobody in the world wants to see an offside given because someone leaned their head forward, or stuck out a foot. If you're in a position to be doing that from an onside position and reaching the ball, basically any player or fan would agree that you're standing in exactly the right place and are in no way gaining an unfair advantage, which is what these rules are supposed to be about. It'd be a lot easier to stomach an offside knowing that you'd definitively moved fully clear of both of the defender's feet and were 100% standing in a more advanced position. A lot less outrage. The heels of both boots. Done. I'd also use a snickometer vs position of heel sensors, because that takes frame rate out of the equation and means you can get it right to the microsecond. It's pretty easy to pick up the sound of the ball being struck. You can hear it on TV but why not point a gun mic at it just to be sure.

At this point I'm thinking it might have been of more use to bring a randomly selected left-footed member of the public than Luke Shaw

Some of the insane logic and cognitive dissonance in here from people desperate to condemn Southgate... wow. Looking at the history of these tournaments, seeing that it is undeniably very rare for even the most blessed, talent-packed sides to consistently challenge, let alone win, and then just shrugging: "Nah I still think he should've won the Euros bare minimum and done better than semis / quarters in World Cups". It's literally just fv<king wrong. You can't just put your fingers in your ears, block out the world and keep repeating that opinion like it means anything in the face of facts and the entire history of football. If you think England's team in these tournaments was so much stronger than the competition that it was almost inevitable they'd win, then fine, but then you're just wrong aren't you? Because it obviously wasn't. And if you don't think the team was that much stronger than everybody else, then you're not making any sense with your expectations and should go for a nap because you're just inventing a parallel football world in your head just for Gareth Southgate and using that instead of the real one. You can talk about style of play and team selection all you like, and these are woolly, subjective matters, but when it comes to the simple matter of getting to finals and winning trophies, the data is in front of you, there's plenty of it, and what is likely or what can be expected on the balance of probabilities (regardless of how strong your squad might be, or how fancied to win) is, really, not that subjective at all. The answer is, undeniably, categorically, resoundingly: it's not that likely, even if you're one of the best sides or playing at home, there's a ton of luck involved, and you should be surprised and delighted if you find yourself in with a shot at a final. I get that people are frustrated with the way England play because they want us to score loads of goals and win and be fun, but why transmute that into just wallowing in wrongness and being totally, obviously wrong? It is a fact that almost no international side ever can consider it likely that they'll get to or win a final.

Yet another big game ruined by a soft VAR handball penalty. The thing absolutely nobody was demanding more of before they decided to spoil the sport by giving way, way more of them. I hate them with a passion. Zero players and fans have ever complained that not enough pens were being given for handball, hardly anybody has ever deliberately handballed to gain an advantage, and almost no handballs ever particularly affect the chances of a team scoring. But here we are thanks to some weird wave of bizarre, senseless dogmatism at the expense of sport, of fairness, of risk / reward and jeopardy being balanced to produce a worthwhile spectacle, and now it feels like about 1 in 3 big games are massively affected by them. Penalties as a whole need to be reformed because the punishment is wildly disproportionate to the crime in almost all cases, but these are the worst. Years of top-level football have been horribly tainted by VAR and especially by soft fv<king VAR handball penalties. Fv<k off.

Declaring the manager a failure based on his achievements in tournaments does not have much to do with just wanting to see some pretty football

Nobody gives a 5h!t til the quarters/ semis really, in terms of lasting memories

That has zero bearing on any assessment of Gareth Southgate. If anything, it shows us that it's unrealistic to expect him to win a trophy. Bit of an own goal frankly Tbh I'd retire unhurt at this point because Rob has conclusively rinsed any argument that Southgate, with his semi / final / quarters record, could possibly be considered anything like a failure. Only if he'd had an absolutely insane, obviously world-beating side at his disposal, such that we were turning up to tournaments as automatic clear favourites, could it be any other way. Give up. You need a major failure of perspective and a total lack of any grip on history to be beating Southgate up for anything other than our selections and style of play at this point - and even then, history is against you, particularly when it comes to England. To make his track record your hill to die on is to die pathetically on quite a small hill. If your definition of a failed international manager is such that practically all of the managers - ever - of every single major footballing nation would be considered failures, maybe it's time to recalibrate? Maybe it's just really hard to put together a team that consistently gets to the business end of major tournaments and even then takes a lot of luck to win them, and that's ok?

"The best squad of players I've ever known... well, if you include the ones who aren't in the squad" What The left back issue alone makes it inferior to every other squad Southgate has taken to a tournament, as far as I'm concerned.

You said we had probably the best squad of players you've ever known

https://www.theguardian.com/football/article/2024/jun/27/austria-are-everything-england-are-not-and-never-have-been-euro-2024

Hmmmmmm sooooo I think the brand new, untested centre back pairing (featuring a Crystal Palace player with 14 caps), mysterious gap in central midfield and total lack of a left back instantly make it an inferior squad to some of our previous ones

https://www.theguardian.com/football/article/2024/jun/27/austria-are-everything-england-are-not-and-never-have-been-euro-2024 I think there is a very good point in there re England's 'minimum expectations', I don't feel there's much need to add to the righteous pasting VP has already received but... yeah. This tournament aside, people will remember coming within a couple of penalties of winning the Euros, the win against Germany, being in a World Cup semi and putting on a decent display against France, yep. A better legacy than almost any other England manager, in terms of memories, but memories take a while to become legends. For all the kids who were 12 - 20 years old in the summer of 2021, smashing Germany and Ukraine en route to an agonising final defeat at Wembley will be their Euro '96. When they grow up some of them will become comedians, TV presenters and pop stars who will appear as talking heads on cheap BBC montage shows, waxing lyrical about Pickford saying 'No problem' before Jorginho's penalty, or Harry Maguire and the Love Train, Gareth's waistcoat, etc etc. They'll nostalgically play Olivia Rodrigo and Ed Sheeran over the top of it all and you will feel even older than you do right now.

Yyyyyyyep, you've nailed it! You've forgotten about all that awful football because your memories of past tournaments = the best performance + one or two goals if it went well, and near-total amnesia if it didn't. You don't remember us getting absolutely nowhere against Spain and Switzerland in 1996. You don't remember us almost getting done by Scotland (see: MacAlister's freak penalty miss) because Gazza scored that goal. You don't remember the blocky, sideways dross that Sven's awesomely talented side served up over and over again, including struggling to get the ball off Ecuador in the last 16 of a World Cup and squeaking past Paraguay thanks to an own goal. You don't remember the mind-numbing awfulness of the Italia 90 campaign, basically all the way up to the comeback against Cameroon, or how fortunate we were to dig out a last gasp winner v Belgium. You don't remember us totally failing to trouble Algeria in 2010 in one of the most aimless displays anyone can possibly ever have seen, from an England side featuring Ashley Cole, Terry, Lampard, Gerrard and Rooney. You don't remember going out with a whimper vs Iceland. Literally the refrain throughout this whole period has been, "How can these players, who light up the European stage with their clubs, look so leaden and clueless in England shirts?". Every tournament, absolutely without fail, since I can remember. Really, this is nothing new.

Indeed. I love that England have this surfeit of gifted number 10's and inside forwards, but without depth and width they've got nothing to work with. Kane, Foden, Saka and Bellingham all gathering in the middle for a D party while Trippier and Walker watch is just painful. Literally the highlight of most of our attacking moves at the moment is when they collapse under their own density and Rice steams in to counterpress. I don't for a second think Southgate is clueless but he's certainly eye-wateringly risk-averse. I don't think he particularly likes it when our games open up, because then we're more of a hostage to lucky counterattacks etc. Something like that. He'd rather bore the absolute t:ts off everyone including his own players, but mostly be in control of the game and on course for a clean sheet.