England and international football

So Southgate all over again but Burn in for Maguire?

Good goal by Kane yesterday. Elite level movement and heading ability to turn that cross into a goal.

When we go out, it won't be because we can't break down a team in a low block. It'll be because a better team outplays us.

If you have a player who is the best number 9 and goal-scorer in world football on the best form of any player in world football, you don't win tournaments by not playing him. We've tried the Watkins instead experiment and it didn't magically make England more fluid and better as a team. If England win this tournament - and I actually think this time they will - it will be because of Kane not despite of him. He'll win the Ballon d'or regardless.

Blind support for the team rather than rationality. Not an insult: the mark of a fan. Obviously I do the same each season with Forest...
I'm not an England fan exactly, but I don't mind them doing well unlike most other Irish people.

Looking at the state of Bellingham (who has been playing in Spain for three years) I can't see us doing anything in this heat. He only played a half, and was dripping ten minutes after the end of the game.

Not really sure what you mean. We have a good chance, not because we're amazing but because nobody really is and and we're as good as anybody. We also have a manager who is tactically very capable, for the first time in a very long time (as opposed to someone reading out loud from a self-help management book straight off the shelves of Crawley waterstones in the style of a goofy John Betjeman). Or if you meant the balloon d'or, 146 goals in 147 games for the second best club side in Europe does that. I don't think there's any real doubt now he's eclipsed Lewandowski, and there's no forward player at an elite club who has a record comparable to that in the last couple of years. If you are lucky enough to have a player that good, you build the rest of the team around him.

If you have a player that good, you maximise their delivery in the most important games, by resting them as much as possible beforehand.
Part of the reason England haven't won as much as might be hoped is because the stars have run themselves into the ground.

That's also how you beat the teams that are "better" than you.

Of course, England might also get knocked out because of a lack of goals from other parts of the pitch, but that's a Nottingham-centric argument.

But losing sharpness and match fitness counters this, so maybe a half is the optimum balance?

After the season they've had I doubt it, but I'm no kind of pro or expert.

Me neither, but folks seem to talk about those things a lot!

Christian Eriksson collapsed on the pitch again, match abandoned on 65 minutes. Starting to think he probably shouldn't play football any more.

Think he has one of those auto-defib things fitted now though, so hopefully it worked.

I know a fella that had one fitted and it’s saved his life a couple of times.

BBC reporting that our likely (obvs lots of uncertainty the further your go) route to glory goes via Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and then Spain.

Now I don't want to be negative, but...

That would require us to win our group.

I said I didn't want to be negative

Hark at Loafer Haw-Haw over here.