footballspectator

In a poor match, Portugal beat England in Gelsenkirchen yesterday to make the semi-finals for the first time since 1966. The match really came alive following the dismissal of Wayne Rooney on 62 minutes for stamping on Ricardo Carvalho’s delicate region. It is difficult to know whether Rooney’s actions were intentional. The replay seems to indicate not and there wasn’t much space for Rooney to plant his foot elsewhere. However, if it was intentional his red card was fully deserved.

From then on, for England it became a matter of holding out for penalties, which they did quite comfortably mainly because Portugal lacked a cutting edge but also because of big performances from Terry, Ferdinand and the much maligned Hargreaves. Portugal themselves also seemed to be looking for penalties, with Scolari strangely taking off Pauleta to leave Portugal without a recognised centre-forward for several minutes. Eriksson brought on Crouch who once again showed just how far off he is from being an international player - his touch was awful and he kept falling over.

In the shoot out it was obvious that England would lose - they always do. Ricardo saved from England’s supposed “big game” players Lampard and Gerrard as well as Carragher before Cristiano Ronaldo slotted home to send the Portuguese wild. So another overhyped England team goes crashing out. The team contributed nothing during the tournament and their heroic rearguard action and penalty exit will probably alter this impression and many will believe that England were unlucky - they weren’t, they just weren’t good enough.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 2nd, 2006 at 14:26 and is filed under WorldCup + England. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.