Subject: [NT] England

We got lucky once, can we get lucky twice?

I'll just say this: who dares wins.

A similar report to the last game against England, except for a completely different scoreline. 0-6 to England.

The tactic wasn't bad, but why would you play Macmillan, Francois and Vandermollen as defensive mids? Two of them can't get the ball because they no tackling, and the other can't keep it or do anything with it. If we had cards or injuries this could make sense, but with Lemieux and Gusberti in unearthly form...

Lemieux was suspended. He got a red card against The Netherlands last week. I would have been very happy to field him. Gusberti simply doesn't have the def to be positioned there. He doesn't have a lot of tech either, by the way. The red probably cost us the match as the loss of the defmid proved to be considerably more damaging than I feared. I hoped to create a bit of pressure by playing a 4-3-3, but our strikers never seemed to be able to do much of anything. The lack of passing from our two attacking midfielders was really depressing. It says enough that the most effective passes came from a defender. We didn't deserve to get a win last week and we deserved a little more out of this game. Still, 3 points against England is 3 more than I expected beforehand.