Fitba

McCoist, is that who it was? He did praise Croatia’s goals in the second half (I didn’t watch the first) but I do find it wearing to hear commentators constantly referring to one of the teams as ‘we’.

Guess we won’t hear him do that for a while. 🥲

Not really Al, Scotland fans have the choice of 15 teams to shout for in the last 16.

That's two hours we can get back next Tuesday.
Toss a coin, decide which goal to use, straight to penalties. Should be done and dusted in less than 20 minutes.

Last night was the best night of football for a while. It showed the potential for excitement that is better seen in club football - and especially attacking teams like ManCity or Liverpool.

England are so worried about losing at times that even players who can and do play a lot better for their clubs, become more conservative. Shame really as we do have a good team capable of beating the best on the day. The England team contains enough players from ManCity/Liverpool/Chelsea who between them have won enough silverware that playing Germany or anyone else should be of little worry.

That's almost a reasonable comparison but perhaps not quite.

Gareth Southgate is a decent manager who gets 90% out of his players but needs to get more out of them now we are in the knock-out stages. It is game management for the mini-league stage that ended last night. Making sure that overall we qualify for knockout. Preserving the best players for when they really need to go for it. All managers do that. If ManCity played what I felt was their best team every match, we would win very little, as you need to rotate players for match fitness, cope with injuries and bring new ones on and gradually let older ones retire gracefully. So Southgate has done his job to date very well. He needs to up his game from B+ to A*. He can do it.

So, perhaps as a team England are not the very very best, but contains enough world class players that playing another of the quality teams should not be a worry. I am not worried about Germany in strict quality terms. But as Lineker once said "football is a game of 90 minutes played by two teams and Germany win". If we beat Germany the remaining teams in our half of the draw hold no worries whatsoever. We should be in the final. The teams who do worry me are Belgium, simply because they have some really superb players, France who can play very well and also have some truly outstanding players but appear sometimes to be a team of individuals, and Spain who have done it before several times. But ManCity beat PSG easily in Champions League over two legs and PSG form the bulk of the France team.

It is in the lap of the gods. If we play to our strengths, we should beat Germany and go on to reach the final. You did not hear it here first... I am merely a hopeful spectator drinking beer in the den watching a TV.

Don't forget in the Premier League very few teams can live with a Man City team when they are on it, CL final and they lose to Chelsea.