Group Winners
Coach Fabio Capello
One to Watch Kyle Walker
As we approach the summer of 2012 all of our minds, well most of them at least, will turn away from the domestic football competitions within our own countries, towards the International arena for the eagerly awaited European Championship Finals, to be held in Poland and the Ukraine. Within a fortnight from now, the world will know the names of the last four teams/countries that will join the 12 nations already guaranteed a place at Euro 2012. Over the next three weeks, we shall be profiling each of the 16 finalists that will bid to become the champions of Europe until 2016.
In the next of our Euro 2012 team profiles, England come under the spotlight. England have the joint oldest national football team having been formed in 1870, they have a proud footballing history and see themselves as inventors of the game which has become their national sport. Needless to say England have been a regular feature at major international tournaments, appearing at the World Cup Finals on thirteen occasions since 1950 and making the European Championships eight times, the first being in 1968. Success however, has been harder to come by in the competitions themselves, the English have only ever won the World Cup once, famously on home ground in 1966, the closest they have come since then was an agonising penalty shoot-out defeat by West Germany in the semi-final at Italia 90. The European Championships, formerly the European Cup of Nations, has proven an even more difficult nut to crack, England’s best achievements in that tournament so far have been a third place finish in 1968 and, another penalty shoot-out defeat by the Germans in the semi-final of Euro 96, this time in front of their home fans.
Since then successive England managers, Glenn Hoddle, Kevin Keegan and Sven Goran Eriksson have fared no better, all successfully negotiating tournament qualification groups and then failing to deliver anything more than quarter final elimination at best. Following Eriksson’s unsuccessful 2006 World Cup campaign he was replaced as head coach by Steve McClaren. Under McClaren’s direction the England team slumped to a new low in modern times, failing to qualify for Euro 2008 was the first time they hadn’t reached a major international competition since their failure to qualify for the 1994 World Cup. McClaren was duly sacked and became the shortest serving England manager ever, he was replaced by Fabio Capello.
Capello arrived with an “Iron Man” reputation, he would instil the discipline required to turn England’s ageing, so called “Golden Generation” into “lean mean winning machines”, and for a while, it looked like he had. England qualified for South Africa 2010 in impressive style, with a game to spare, sealing their place with a 5-1 home win over Croatia. Things were looking rosy, however, once again at the tournament itself, England started off in shaky fashion, only just scraping through the group stage. It was clear from the very start that the problems of old hadn’t been fixed, Capello was unsure who his goalkeeper should be, Gerrard and Lampard were still being used together despite their obvious deficiency as a partnership, and the 4-4-2 system employed by Capello looked totally out of date. By the time England faced Germany in the second round, the team were at sixes and sevens, bereft of drive or confidence in themselves or each other and pretty quickly were being put to the sword by a dynamic, exciting, young German side who knew how to play together. England went home.
Since then, Capello has been forced to ring the changes and has tried to bring in some younger, fresher talent. It seems to be working at the moment with the England side qualifying unbeaten for next year’s Euros and recently defeating World and European Champions Spain in a friendly. One of the newer players in the England fold is Kyle Walker. Walker is a whippet-like right back who can play on the right of midfield too, his pace, fearlessness and ability to deliver in the final third, along with real defensive ability make him one to earmark in the summer when the tournament begins.
It is almost impossible to predict England’s chances of success in Poland and Ukraine, they have qualified well enough, but then they have done that many times before without further achievement. I don’t think Capello knows his best eleven at all and despite having a fairly deep pool of talent to choose from, he doesn’t transmit the confidence of having a clear plan as yet. The suspension of Rooney for the Group Stage is also a major headache along with the poor form of recognised central defensive pair Terry and Ferdinand. With all of these factors in mind and their abject showing in South Africa, I would be fairly surprised if England made it past the quarter finals this time around.
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Germany vs Holland / Oranje vs ‘Die Mannschaft’ – Old football rivalry of 70′s/80′s re-lived tomorrow evening in Hamburg in International friendly match – by OTA-Berlin Constituency Blog sports contributor Filip van der Plas
November 15th, 2011[ Football pitch with dimensions from Wikipedia by 'NielsF']
Tomorrow evening in Hamburg at 2045hrs the Dutch national football team – otherwise known as ‘Oranje’ or ‘Orange’ – will play a ‘friendly international’ against Germany.
Both teams played tied friendly games last Friday – Germany came from behind and ended in a 3-3 away draw against Ukraine while the Netherlands faced a determined Swiss team and played to a boring 0-0 result.
The less enlightened of the media of both nations are playing up the nationalist sentiments by saying there is a lot of prestige at stake and playing up the decades old rivalry between this ‘Oranje and Die Mannschaft’.
This does indeed to some degree still exist however most football fans have moved on from 1974 and 1988 and while some petty squabbling is inevitable both teams – and most fans -have a grudging respect for each other.
It is now generally admitted in the Netherlands that on that World Cup Final day in 1974, Germany deserved their win – they were on the day better than the Oranje team – who perhaps had been the better team over the entire tournament.
However that was not the case in Argentina 4 years later in the 1978 World Cup final when in fact Argentina was not the better team in the final and through various incidents of devious and unscrupulous behavior could be quite conclusively accused of having stolen that win.
However Denis Bergkamp, another one of those classical Dutch strikers like Marco van Basten, made up for that loss in part by a miraculous goal in Paris many years later when Holland beat Argentina in the quarter finals. It was high-lighted this week in the UK Guardian newspaper. http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/nov/11/joy-of-six-first-touches-bergkamp?INTCMP=SRCH
Who says Dutch football commentators are un-emotional! – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqEWpHuib9A
Today’s very young German team play attractive passing football with lots of concomitant creativity up-front which results in lots of nice goals.
And when it comes to creative football the Dutch have an imagination like no other, even though they were a bit let-done in the final of the South Africa World Cup last year where they lost in overtime 0-1 with 10 men to Spain.
The ‘KNVB’ Dutch football federation coach Bert van Marwijk just like his German counterpart the Deutsche Fußball-Bundé ‘DFB’s Jogi Löw have been forced to experiment recently – partly from necessity and partly from curiosity to test different player combinations.
Being Dutch and living in Germany I have come to appreciate the Bundesliga and German players while recognizing that historically there have not been too many real ‘friendly’ matches between Germany and the Netherlands.
The rivalry between the two countries since the World Cup of 1974 and the Euro 1988 competition -if you do not include WWII – has been profound, however since more Dutch players and coaches are now in the Bundesliga itself a better understanding and more mature relationship has resulted.
Time heals all wounds they say and I feel that is the case in this respect and I look forward to the game tomorrow and want and expect an open ended game, with hopefully lots good scoring opportunities and fluid and open play.
Both teams can and usually do play an open and aggressive attacking type of football – and are both known for their offensive goal scoring abilities.
The teams are pretty evenly matched. Both mid-fields are good, with perhaps an edge for the Netherlands. Defensively with Neuer in goal perhaps Germany may have an edge there.
Both teams have young defenders who still tend to fall asleep and lose their concentration and can make the most outrageous and irritatingly stupid mistakes when the goalies are then left somehow to produce some instant magic in order to clean-up!
Absent for the Netherlands will be Robin van Persie, the injured Rafael van der Vaart, and the recuperating Arjen Robben and Ibrahim Afellay – so too bad that the Netherlands will not play up its strongest team.
Klaas-Jan Huntelaar of the German Bundesliga team ‘Schaller 04’ will be wearing a mask to protect his fully broken nose which he received playing in a Champions League game about 10 days ago.
The young German team are in very good physical condition and `always keep going for the full 90 minutes` the only Dutch player like this is Dirk Kuyt, in fact a sort of `Dutch German`.
Likewise Germany’s team will be missing some important players like Bastian Schweinsteiger and Philipp Lahm – Miroslav Klose and Marco Reus will be fit.
Mesut Özil – without a doubt a world-class player just starting his career – Khedira, Cacau, Mario Gomez, Tomas Mueller and the 19 year-old Mario Götze who plays for Borussia Dortmund, along with the Polish-born Podolski and Klose are all part of a very attractive German football side.
While no-one is expecting a ‘love-in’ – football is after all a very competitive and contact sport – the atmosphere should be one of mutual respect and played in the spirit of friendship.
Usually these games end in ties – so we will see tomorrow.
Tomorrow live 2015 on ZDF – don’t miss it!
This evening on Sport 1 on German TV see a documentary with a live debat after the show on the topic of ‘Deutschland gegen Holland’ – http://www.hoerzu.de/tv-programm/sendung/deutschland-gegen-holland-das-talkduell/sport1/14.11.2011/21.45
For some of the truely great goals of the Netherlands team in Euro 1988 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv4IgrV4HVM&NR=1
See also – http://netherlands.worldcupblog.org/
this article kindly allowed to be reprinted from the OTA-Berlin Constituency Blog
This article is the property of and copyrighted to its owner http://e-u-r-o-2012.com.We welcome any links to blog articles – however they may be reproduced or copied only with the prior written permission of http://e-u-r-o-2012.com.
The opinions expressed are not necessarily those ‘EURO 2012 Blog’ but of the contributor.
Subsequent comments to the blog articles that appear on the site are not the opinion of ‘EURO 2012 Blog’ but only of the comment writer.
Personal attacks, offensive language, racist, sexist, bigoted views and unsubstantiated allegations will not be printed. ‘ EURO 2012 Blog’ reserves the right to determine if comments are any of the above.
Tags: case in argentina, dutch football, football commentators, football fans, football pitch, friendly games, german team, guardian newspaper, last friday, marco van basten, national football team, oranje, quarter finals, srch, strikers, swiss team, tomorrow evening, uk guardian, unscrupulous behavior, wikipedia
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