Last night I stayed up late to watch the match between England and Argentina and unlike previous occasions when it has hurt (I will never forgive nor forget Maradona's Hand of God, nor Lampard's disallowed goal), there was a sense of predictable inevitability about what happened.
I messed up my times slightly and consequently only watched the second half. In fact I only realised when England scored and the timer said 55 minutes. In fact, when we scored my first thought was "s**t we scored too early". England have a track record of sitting back to protect a lead and when we are playing world class teams it never works out. I was slightly relieved to see that we were already a good part of the way into the second half, but I found myself already clock watching.
Incidentally, Morgan Rogers who set up the England goal was playing for my Lincoln City just 4 years ago! Here he is in his Lincoln kit.
Then when it got to about 84 minutes I was thinking, we just need to hold on for another 12-15 minutes tops and hope began to rise. Meanwhile Argentina were bombarding our defence with and aggression that they lacked in the 1982 Falklands conflict. I remember thinking we're almost there and I dared to believe. Exactly 30 seconds later Argentina scored the first of two quick-fire goals and that was it we were done, and frankly we lost the game mentally because of our own weaknesses. I will leave the final word to Michael Owen, who memorably scored an incredible goal against Argentina in 1998.
"Watch Spain at 1-0 last night. That’s courage. That’s bravery. And then watch England at 1-0.”
“What’s the difference? We are a better team than Argentina, I’ve no doubt in my mind. But we deserved to get beat in the end. In fact, it could have been 4-1.”
“Bringing on 3 defenders at 1-0 up. What message does that send?”
“Until we understand that courage and bravery is controlling possession under pressure and not booting / heading it up the field 40 yards then this will always be the end result."
I think he hit the nail on the head. We were undone by our lack of bravery and it was all so sadly predicatable
As always stay safe and well my friends.
