Yesterday wasn’t at all a good day for me, well I was having a good day until 5:10pm, when while cleaning out the dishwashing machine, my mobile phone fell out of my shirt pocket into the water in the bottom of the machine. I picked up the phone within a split second, but the damage was already done, it wasn’t just water either, it had the detergents in the water as well, which isn’t good for your hands let alone electronic devices. The phone has dried out now, and turns on, but wont charge, which means its effectively useless, at least it stayed on long enough to copy all my phone numbers over to the SIM card. I will need to buy myself a cheap phone until the contract expires and I can upgrade the phone to something better. But this real pisser is that I used the phone for music while walking to and from work, and I doubt that I will be able to get another music phone cheaply, so I will have to dig out my old 128MB cheapo mp3 player again, and the cheapness shows in the sound!
Second thing was the England game, what the hell was England doing? Sven needs to get his tactics sorted out as he is constantly playing the wrong formation, 4-4-2 doesn’t suit the England setup at all. And playing Jamie Carragher in as right back is insane, and why the hell does he keep playing Owen Hargreaves over Michael Carrick? Anyway, the result was 2 – 2 with the English taking the lead twice in the game, and conceding soft goals, but that long range dipping goal from Joe Cole was amazing, certainly best goal of the tournament for me. And England’s midfield ace, Steven Gerrard restored the one goal advantage after coming on for Rooney. England could and should have won this game, they are a much better side than Sweden, but Eriksson seems to have no clue about his teams strengths, and plays many players out of their natural position and not playing his strongest players, Hargreaves for example, he hasn’t done much so far in this tournament, and consistently lets the side down. Also playing Rooney isn’t necessarily the right thing to do as he seems almost impotent at times, and only a shadow of his former self, but because Eriksson only took four strikers, now that Owen is likely to be out for the rest of the World Cup, there are only three strikers available. And one of them is untested, Theo Walcott, who hasn’t even played a premiership game for Arsenal yet; and then you have Crouch, who played shit last night, it seems to me that he couldn’t be bothered to chase the ball, if the ball wasn’t played to his feet, he just stood there, instead of running onto the ball. The way things are going, I can see Gerrard playing as a make-shift striker, sitting just behind Rooney, which isn’t where Gerrard is most comfortable, he needs to be given a midfield free role to be most effective as he showed in the Trinidad & Tobago and Sweden games. But I suppose it doesn’t matter as England topped the group anyway and avoid Germany in the next round, and the only time we can meet Germany now is in the final should both teams progress that far. But England need to do better from now on, as its straight knock out, so no second chances or excuses, as things stand I don’t see England winning the World Cup, some radical changes need to happen to make teams fear us, Ecuador certainly wont fear us at the moment!