Inverted

The football gods will continue to punish England so long as they insist on putting Kane at risk of winning a trophy.

This seems like the closest that Foden's gotten to playing his usual Man City inside forward position and it's showing in the performance.

Either the force of his follow-through catching Dumfries naturally threw him down to the floor in agony. Or it didn't, and he he went down to get a decision. The latter is what's known as a dive.

He went down and exaggerated the contact, which is likely what provoked the VAR review. It's a textbook dive.

The quality of the penalty and the dive to get it are basically the main reason you pick Kane at this point.

Some more classic defensive solidity from Walker, there.

Slovakia have gone very deep very early. They've already been defending for most of the last 10 minutes and still have about 15 to go. Quite risky.

Alexander-Arnold had people foaming at the mouth for misplacing a few passes in midfield and Stones, Walker and Tripper are playing like they're in a K-hole ffs.

England have a generational fullback that Real Madrid are tapping up and they've got Walker and Trippier out there getting rinsed by Eastern Bloc randos.

I've got England in the work sweepstakes so I can't even enjoy this. Liven up Southgate you toothy prick.

Unbelievable how poor Italy looked. They don't have the talent of previous sides, but they have a team with at least decent players in every position, mostly pretty good players, and even one or two great players. It is hard to understand how they can just be thrown about like that and offer almost no competition.

Plus, once Robertson and Tierney start declining (which might already be happening) our best player is then probably going to be Billy Gilmour. Who is a great player, but again, deep-lying playmakers are not generally the type of players who single-handedly win games. Can only hope that Ben Doak actually does become as good as it seems he might.

I think the fans do acknowledge that the squad is limited, but nonetheless feel Clarke needs to go. And I think the lack of balance in the squad is if anything a reason to be more adventurous. The way Clarke plays is as though the gameplan is "be solid, take no risks, and hope to create a chance out of nothing". But we don't have the personnel to do that - not enough solid defenders to sit deep, and no flair players to create chances on their own. During qualifying most chances were made by overwhelming opposition with runners from midfield and on the flanks. But its basically impossible to do that while playing defensively.

Georgia are a good example of the ideal type of team for a small country without many good players. A few flair players up top who can create goals from very little, and then a brilliant keeper who can keep you in games. Those types of contributions are easily felt in a tournament format where you've only got 3 games to perform. Whereas, things like John McGinn winning a shit ton of free kicks might make a difference over the course of a whole season but they don't decide games in the short term.

The way Scotland's talent is spread out is extremely non-optimal for a small nation. The ideal setup seems to be having a decent spread of average, hard-working players, and then one or two quality creative or attacking players. If you have no glaring weak spots, and can produce one or two moments of quality per game, you can do reasonably well. Scotland have two elite left backs, several fairly good box-to-box midfielders, two promising but injured right backs, and a couple of decent centre backs. The rest of the squad is pretty much terrible. We are stacked in a couple of positions, but they are positions that don't really win games.