Brand new blog - commentary on countdown to world cup!

Welcome to my brand new blog! Once again the English team has proven just how great they are with a brand new outlook and some fresh players who are willing to make an impression for the glory of winning a major trophy. England have been amazing under Southgate and frankly not many people gave him a chance at retaining the England job since his lack of experience and a low profile made him seem like a poor choice to take on the rest of the world with a very young England team. I have been extremely surprised at just how well England played against Croatia as well as in the World cup, we look like a different side from the so called "Golden" Generation with the likes of Beckham, Rooney and Rio Ferdinand on the team sheet. I see England as a major team now that is capable of going all the way in any tournament, we are a real threat with Kane upfront and so many good players are emerging under Southgates leadership skills, one of the best things he goes is to look at what strategies work and look at what we need to do from a defensive stand point. He has done a great job at making sure England get plenty of set pieces and will often make sure players are in good positions to draw fouls from defenders as well as making sure we keep possession of the ball and kill the momentum of the opposition by slowing the game down, we are very calm on the ball now and can often keep hold of it until the momentum of the attacking team dies down. Instead of hitting the long pass and trying to beat defenders we are now building from the back with great passes and taking our time to create openings, this plays to our strengths since our team is not always the best in the air and not a very fast team in terms of pace either, we need a way to score goals and so many of them from previous tournaments have come from set pieces such as corners, free kicks and penalties, we do well in these places because they don't require us to be better than the competition, we just have to move into a good space. Defensively we have always been very shaky at the back purely because when the pressure is on or we are winning by 1 goal we tend to sit back and let the opposition attack us, eventually we get nervous and make mistakes which leads to them scoring, now we keep calm and don't blast the ball up field, instead we keep control and pass it around until the attack dies off, a great strategy that saves many goals. After the match was over we headed out to do a spot of fishing and discussed just how good England looked compared to previous generations, there is of course a long way to go but we seem to be improving with every game, I guess I'm not going to be doing much fishing at we get deeper into the tournament so I'm not going to get much use out of my new T900 rod so until the next time please enjoy my commentary until we reach the final, place bets now!