Now that we are down to the last eight of this years World Cup Finals, let me try and reflect on what has gone on so far. It has been an amazing tournament and has had all the spills and thrills that were so lacking in South Africa 2010. I could type all night and not do the tournament justice, so I am just going to focus in on two areas of this brilliant tournament.
Firstly I will bring my opinions on the refereeing,then I must reflect on how England got on, as these two subjects are in my opinion huge.
The refereeing in this tournament has been a breath of fresh air for me. It is as if the referees have been instructed to let the games flow and keep yellow cards to a minimum, unless really necessary. Best refereeing performance for me was Howard Webb in the Brazil v Mexico game. I thought Howard was superb on the night. He let a few challenges go,early in the game and it seemed to work for him. It was a game were he could have been crucified. The host nation need to go far and if he was to have made an error which would have put them out, there would have been murder. The best decision of the game was the handball call on Hulk. To disallow the goal for hand ball was refereeing out of the top drawer and in my opinion has elevated Howard now to possibly the best referee in Europe. It was a performance that could possibly have got him the final,but as we know he was the man in the middle for the 2010 final.
There was one other stand out refereeing performance for me and it came from an unfamiliar referee to me. The referee in charge for the Chile v Holland game was a guy called Bakary Gassama from Gambia. Now I know very little about Gambian football and when I saw this appointment I worried for the guy. But he was superb,he controlled the game excellently and was not fooled by an awful lot of gamesmanship by both sides,so hats off to that man as well.
I will now try and make sense of what I can only call an abysmal performance at these finals by England. The build up to the finals was low key for a side who seemed to go into the finals expecting not to be going anywhere fast. Roy Hodgson decided to pick a young squad to bring with him to Rio,but it did not work. I thought his tactics were awful and can't believe the press have not hammered into him, since the team has returned home. Against Italy his tactics let Pirlo run the show and if he had put someone to sit on the Italian playmaker things could have been oh so different.
Against Uruguay he allowed his players to stay so far off Suarez,that I thought the Uruguay player had an exclusion zone placed around him. As we all know that Luis had a knee operation before the finals and if I had have been boss, I would have employed tactics to test out the knee instead of looking at the little man scoring the two goals to virtually knock the one time World Cup Winners out. The most bizarre decision he made throughout the whole tournament was when he took on Costa Rica. Gerrard and Lampard cannot play together we have been hearing for years, yet Hodgson had the two of them on the park in the final game. Most managers of the big nations who failed in this tournament,resigned after their sides exit but not Roy he is going on. He failed at Euro 12 and now has a double up, by failing at World Cup 2014.
So as I said earlier I am amazed that the press have not gone after him, but maybe they to are fed up with England under performing on the big stage and can't be arsed to write about it.
