.....to describe England's 2-0 loss to Croatia. With all respect to Hrvetska, they outplayed England in ALL areas with a brilliant tinkering of strategy from their traditional 3-5-2 to a 4-4-2 formation, hence beating England in their own game literally! But I'd have to say, even though Croatia HAVE NOT BEEN DEFEATED ON HOME SOIL IN COMPETITVE GAMES FOR 5 YEARS, England should not have been outplayed by Croatia to that extend. The stats don't lie..England, for all of its quality and "best ever squad since 1970", merely mustered 7 shots (4 on target) while Croatia had more than double that amount - 15 shots (9 on target)...Not to mention that all the shots England made, save for Rooney's effort in the 59th minute which he should have done better with (more on that later), were hopeful efforts to say the most. Possession-wise, England had a mere 48% of the ball while Croatia enjoyed the lion's share of it, at 58%...

Tempting fate if you guys allow me, I'd call for HALF of the England team to be dropped right now as they:
1) are not playing for the country as well as they're doing for their clubs..
2) have seemingly lost their passion and commitment levels when it comes to donning the 3 Lions on their shirt
3) are only there on reputation, not on current form...

The guilty parties are Gary Neville, Rio Ferdinand, Ashley Cole, Michael Carrick, Frank Lampard and Wayne Rooney...

• Gary Neville, as I've highlighted in my earlier posting about the Macedonia game, was AWOL when Croatia counter-attacked, all because he's on a wing-back role and can't track back on time.
  
• Rio Ferdinand is arguably a 30-million-pound Titus Bramble - think he's world-class, clumsy, loses concentration. What else can i say?
• Ashley Cole is also not a wing-back..he did try his best, but he's clumsy as well and doesn't do as well for Chelsea/Arsenal as his England performances.
• Michael Carrick is a distributor of the ball, able to send pinpoint passes to players all over the pitch in pace, direction and power he wants the ball to go with..However, as alot of people mistaken him for, he's not Claude Makelele a la destroyer of opponent's play. He cant tackle for nuts, and his passing range was missing from the Split disaster as he was a mere spectator who had a few misplaced passes..Defensive midfielder he's not...
• Frank Lampard...well documented dip in form, seem likes he's slowly finding his feet back at Chelsea..but he's taking his England place for granted.
  
• Wayne Rooney..smiliar to Lampard..not scoring for England in almost 2 years says it all for the 20-year old prodigy. Needs to come off the bench to relight his fire and also to maybe allow the magical touch to slowly come back, NATURALLY.

All of these mistakes leads back to 1 person, starting with S (yet again)..Steve McClaren. He's not practicing what he preaches - picking players based on form, not reputation. Yes dropping Beckham is a right thing to do in my opinion. His only talent is dead-ball situations now (crossing abit suspect..but still worthy maybe), and having him as a squad player could have done the trick. But Beckham or not, this England team is still filled with primma donnas from the previous set-up who think they're world-class and hence deserves a place on the squad. Well i say screw you guys..it's time for McClaren to stand up and be counted for. Taking the flak for this defeat is a good step in the right direction, but he'll need to do a lot more than that to gain public confidence back. Till then, the next Euro 2008 qualifier against Israel in March 2007 at least, he'll need to start thinking on how to fine-tune England into a unit capable of being best at 4-4-2 firstly, then moving on to be TOTALLY COMFORTABLE in other formation to trouble continental teams. This starts with a friendly against Holland on November