England’s performance against Malta and Slovenia

Have you seen a weaker English national team? I can’t remember such. I don’t know whether is because of Gareth Southgate’s tactics, but the performance in the previous two qualifying matches was quite unsatisfactory. Even though England beat Malta 2-0, we saw lots of missed opportunities, which in a match against a stronger opponent would have costed us the victory.

To continue with, these chances were well created, but the shots weren’t even close to the goal. For example, Jesse Lingard’s attempts were awful. So, Jesse, if you don’t feel sure about your shooting abilities – just pass the ball! In addition, Daniel Sturridge made an incredible miss. He couldn’t hit the target from about 2 meters, sending the ball outside the stadium… However, Sturridge eventually scored a nice header goal in the 29th minute, which we must admit, was a great effort from him.

Yes, we created several good goal-scoring chances, but we didn’t scare the Maltese players, who are used to conceding lots of goals. Dele Alli secured the points, scoring the second goal of the match in the 38th minute. And after this goal, all the people expected us to smash Malta with more goals – for extra confidence, but almost nothing interesting happened until the end of the game. Just the opposite – Malta could even score in the end of the match. And now, when I am looking at the highlights again, I can’t stop laughing at Lingard, Sturridge and Alli missing chance after chance, which actually is not funny, but tragic.

Moreover, Wayne Rooney is obviously not in his best form, but without him, it was even worse. In the match against Slovenia the captain of the team was on the bench and appeared in the 73rd minute. Eric Dier was expected to bring stability in defence. That’s why he was used instead of Rooney. The only thing I saw was lots of clear goal-scoring chances for Slovenia, including a shot in the post. So, we should feel extremely lucky with the point after the 0-0 draw in Ljubljana. Of course, we shouldn’t underestimate Slovenia performance, because they made great efforts to beat us and were extremely lucky in front of goal.

To beat a goalkeeper such as Jan Oblak you have to do something special – something we don’t have in our squad at the moment… Because his stats have been more than impressive since the beginning of the new season. The goalkeeper has only conceded 2 goals in 9 matches with Atletico Madrid’s shirt.

In the 10th minute Eric Dier made a silly error, passing the ball back to his goalkeeper, which was intercepted by Roman Bezjak, but Joe Hart made a good save. Then, Kurtic hit the post from Slovenia’s next attempt in the same attack.

Furthermore, the Slovenians organized several very good attacks during the second half, causing serious problems for the Three Lions’ defence. Joe Hart showed great reflexes in the 46th minute, saving shots after two corner kicks. So, the on-loan goalkeeper was the key reason for England’s point. Dier made his second big mistake of the match in the 59th minute, when he made a wrong pass again, but the Slovenians couldn’t take advantage of the situation. Henderson repeated Dier’s mistake 10 minutes later, but Joe Hart had “locked” his goal, saving one on one situation again.

England had 3 chances to score against Slovenia, but they were after shots from long distance and Oblak didn’t have problems to tip the ball away. But, with this playing style we will hardly find our place in the World Cup 2018. Moreover, only the first place gives a place in the final tournament, while the second will surely secure a participation in the playoffs. And as we saw, there are 4 more teams, which are good enough to fight for these 2 places. We mustn’t underestimate the team of Lithuania, which hasn’t lost a game in its first 3 matches (1 victory and 2 draws).