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I'm bored at work and have been thinking about the England team. The current strengths that seem to be thrown around a lot is that we have a great squad with players capable of winning a competition and that is what is levelled at Southgate, that he is not using them properly. For me when I look at the current England team I can break it down into 3 categories; good players that ultimately aren't that great, top level players and then elite level players. I'll break the starting eleven and subs down into those categories: Good: Pickford, Ramsdale, Rice, Phillips, Mount, Shaw, Maguire, Coady, Trippier, Dier, Gallagher, Wilson, Pope Top Level: Sterling, Rashford, Grealish, Saka, Foden, Maddison, Henderson, Stones. Elite: Kane, Trent, James, Walker, Bellingham. There are two main issues with this squad based on how I rank them. The first is that is our best players are competing for the same positions, we have three world class right backs competing for the same position and then we have 5 top level wingers competing for 2 positions. Yes we have strength in depth there, but ultimately you can only ever play two wingers at once, you can only play one right back at once. Depth is great for injuries or subbing players on to change a game, but it's not great when our second main issue for me is that the rest of the first eleven is actually fairly average by top 10 international team standards. Looking at our starting elevens throughout the tournament, teams that most England fans were actually happy about, players like Pickford, Shaw, Maguire, Rice, Henderson and Mount, these are players imo who would struggle to get consistently picked by Argentina, Brazil, France, Netherlands and Croatia. So the team has this lack of balance where we have a really good strike force available but then a fairly average midfield and defence, and specifically looking at the midfield, we lack players who can dictate possession and thread passes through for forwards to run onto. Henderson is a great player when it comes to energising a midfield, leading players and also making world class players perform even better. But he is not the man who is going to step up and be the difference maker in midfield, and that can't solely be relied on from Bellingham either. Because away from Bellingham we don't really have many creative players. Now I did mention Maddison above, and so hopefully in the future we can see more of him, I think Maddison is the only real option as an attacking midfielder that we have moving forward, but again the options are minimal. When you look at the list of players available for England some fans see a potential world cup winning side, but we are so stacked in positions where we can only play max 3 of the 8 or so players available, the rest struggles to compete at the very highest level. The issue for me is that we do not have a good enough first eleven currently and I don't think sacking Southgate will change that, I'm not completely sold on Southgate but you can argue that he's best placed to work out where we can up the quality around the first team.

It’s like bizarro Marty McFly and Doc what’s-his-face from back to the future going on ridiculous sci-fi adventures with (imo) good jokes

Not much between them tbh. And is Trent is world class The 5 wingers do make most squads but our issue is theres only 2 positions for them.

I don't mean in that sense. England should be playing attacking possession football, but at the same time you need to be more agressive and shithouse a little bit. All World Cup winners or sides who go far have a little bit of this to their game.

Everybody that's a 'pro wrestler' today lives for there video games and Twitter interactions whilst Matt Riddle's in a love triangle with two porn stars and going to rehab. What a throwback.

You would like the last episode of season 6 because Morty gets a lightsabre...

I’m glad it’s popular - it deserves success. It takes a lot of what the recent Doom reboots did really well, adds it’s own interesting game mechanics that make it very fun, has a unique art style, and is pretty funny. Ticks a lot of boxes for a fun single player shooter.

Doing the business apparently. https://www.eurogamer.net/high-on-life-is-now-the-most-popular-thing-on-xbox-game-pass

I was going to say "why would you want to watch such an awful team?", but then I realised that you were referring to the women's team and not the men's, so I'll let you off .

Pretty shit news about Broja... hope he makes a decent recovery In other shit news it turns out that Vialli's condition has worsened for him.. wish him all the best, got a lot of respect for him Gianluca Vialli condition 'has worsened' as he continues cancer fight (msn.com)

I remember playing the Resident Evil games as a kid, and always shitting myself when I opened a door.

Alien Isolation is the game I know I will never play, thanks to @Mel81x's great depiction of how scary it is a while ago I am ok with tension and suspense, but I'm a complete chickenshit when it comes to jumpscares and monsters appearing out of nowhere

Mount is a decent enough player but he blows hot and cold and I don't see any growing improvement in his play unlike James who has continued to improve season on season. I think some players tend to get carried away with any hype that surrounds them off the back of a few decent games rather than looking at the overall season performance.. I would like to see much more from him and he should be pushing himself more before thinking he can command that kind of cash per week..

Yeah when he joined Palace I wasnt thrilled as we already had four competent central defenders and we need to strengthen in several other areas. To say he ended up exceeding expectations was an understatement.