[Sciolist]

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Our team/management/Football Association is a complete farce. The players are some of the best in the world on paper yet play with no passion or effort, the manager is a joke and the FA are useless, inept tools. Seriously, England is going to be such a depressing place this coming summer.

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I had £20 on Croatia at 10.5.

I'd firstly like to say that Sven was a good manager and we shot him down because our press like shooting people down. Consistently reaching the final 8 of major tournaments is a great achievement. We are not the world's superpower anymore.

Secondly, our group was hard. I cannot believe that everyone said Russia/Croatia/Israel/Macedonia are pushovers, they are all good teams. The fact that our press constantly played them down is disgraceful, it smells of xenophobia to me. The fact that I could bet on Croatia at 10.5 (TEN POINT FIVE!) shows this in itself.

Thirdly, I think our players are fine. I don't doubt that Maclaren is in above his head, but I don't think it's a terrible problem. I think the reason we underperform is that the top managers have drilled their players very carefully for their specific club systems. They always know what to do in every spot - look at Chelsea's group defending under Mourinho. Maclaren doesn't get any time to do this with England, so the players are all playing different systems and end up in the wrong places.

I agree that the FA are corrupt and incompetent though. We need to wipe away the entire board system (look at their regs, it's ridiculous) and start again. We should stop playing ANY friendlies. Let's have a home nation's competition every other year - that's fine - but ignore non competitive games. We never get anything from them. Have training sessions with England instead, get the coach to give them an idea of how he wants them to play.

Then, hire a good manager. Maclaren should obviously go, we have plenty of time to hire a new one, let's wait til after Euro 2008.