Against All Odds

The start of the World Cup is now less than a week away, and I am beginning to get that buzz of anticipation. I am English, and proud of it, and I am just old enough to remember 1966 and that joyful feeling of being on top of the world. Little did I know that it would be at least fifty years before having that experience again. Reality check… we haven’t even won the Euros. However, over all those fifty years, for every one of those twenty-four or so major championships, we, England, have been a contender. Please don’t laugh. We have. And we still are.

Just for a moment lets take all the personal national emotion out of it. What do the bookies think? Well, England are rated by the bookies at between 14-1 and 20-1, which means we have a chance, albeit a slim one, in the eyes of those people whose job it is to gauge the true likelihood of us winning. And I suspect that over the last twenty years, in all those competitions, our odds would have been very similar. Are we the favourites? Of course not. But where do we rank this time? I’ll tell you… seventh.

The favourite six are Germany, Brazil and Spain, naturally enough, then Argentina and France, who will always be a threat, and Belgium, who have star quality in their current squad. We have a better chance this time around than two sides who would usually be more fancied than us. I am referring now to Italy and Holland. At least we don’t have to worry about them this year, they didn’t even make the finals!

Seventh. That means we should get knocked out in the quarter finals. But like most football fans I am an optimist, and so ask myself why we cannot go further. We will need to perform adequately to beat Tunisia and Panama and we will need to play very well, of course, to beat the other top sides.

But I really do feel that Southgate has managed to put us in a very good place, physically and mentally, to start the competition. We appear to have settled on a system with three at the back, and everyone in the squad seems to have bought into the theory behind it despite many of them not playing that way for their clubs. We have no prima donnas in the team this time around. And Southgate does not need to worry about, for example, how to get the best from Rooney, or whether he can accommodate Lampard AND Gerrard. There is a freshness and youthful energy about the squad, vitally important to get the best from a formation that relies on more players getting forward while at the same time covering for those forward runs.

So, do we have a game plan? Yes
Are we capable of carrying it out? Yes
Will we get knocked out of our stride by the better teams? Possibly
Can we beat the better teams? Why not.

We will obviously need to play very well, have the run of the ball at vital moments, conjure up that bit of match-winning magic, and keep our nerve. But I do believe there is a real possibility that, this time around, we can upset the odds and ……..