if Gerrard feels any pain then frankly - why the f*ck is he playing for England? he should have pulled out and let someone else play. he isn't the only player in England. there are other central midfielders.

if he's not sharp and not match fit he should not, I repeat, he should not be playing for England. I'm sick of the likes of Owen and Beckham putting their desire and selfishness in playing for England ahead of what's best for the team, it's cost England in the last 2 World Cups. It IS selfishness. nothing more, nothing less.

if these players aren't fit, and they know they aren't fit, why are they pulling on an England shirt?

More importantly if the manager knows these players aren't fit, why the hell is he selecting them in the squad let alone putting them in the starting 11?

England have enough quality in reserve for qualifying games against the weaker of the top teams to not risk the unfit players. Surely a better performance would come from a fully fit reserve player than an 75% fit first teamer.

Gerrard had a good game against Israel, one of his best in a long time, but I don't think he had the fitness levels to play two full games of 90. McClaren should have taken him off once the Israel game was pretty secure to makesure he could get through the at least 60 minutes against Russia, playing good football. Instead Stevie G was rather lackluster, despite a very good performance from the England midfield.

It'll be interesting to see if the likes of Gareth Barry and Emile Heskey can take their strong performances into the league games before the next set of internationals. If they do, and the likes of Rooney and Lumpard aren't doing anything spectacular, then they should keep their places in the starting 11.

Do you honestly believe that MTTC?

Funny how when Gerrard pulled out of the Germany game which was a friendly everyone is saying how Frank Lampard was playing on a broken toe and Gerrard was a Nancy Boy. Now he plays on a broken toe, without a pain shot as well and you lot are rubbishing his decission and McClarrens to play Gerrard. Now if you think Gerrard had a lackluster performance in either games then I beg you to go and watch them again. Ask Barry how easy Gerrard makes things. How much easier it is to play in a midfield with him. How much attention Gerrard demands and how much space it allows others around him. Thats why you everyone is so mystified at why Lamps and Gerrard dont work. In the Russia Game Gerrard set the tone early with a crunching tackle in the first 3 minutes. One thing you get from Gerrard is 100% and weather he scores or not has a blinder of an individual performance or not he will make the players around him better. Gerrard is one of the best Central Midfielders in the World not because he wears a Red Shirt but because he bleeds for it. He puts it all on the line for both club and country. I think McClarren will drop both Rooney and Lampard to the Subs bench for the next match atleast I think Barry will keep his place.

England looked more a team in the last 2 games than they have since the famous Victory over Germany which Gerrard, Heskey and Owen all played in. And if I recall they all scored on the day as well.


Rio had a stinker of all the England players if you ask me. But you lot have hard one for our dear Stevie don't you?

england won because of 3 reasons
- injuries to becks, lampard and rooney
- stevie g playing alongside a partner who compliments him rather than someone who 'tries to ' compete with him
- owen scoring goals alongside a partner who compliments him

like it or not, this english selection looked like a TEAM rather an a collection of expensive misfits..

barry acquited himself fabulously at this level, his passing was great and he being left footed, complimented stevie g and his box to box rampaging. hope all the hype surrounding fat frank is now finally put to rest. lamps, becks and wazza can now be used as great impact subsitutes.rather than starting players..

cheers
KD

Don't get me wrong I am not trying to re ignite the Gerrard / Lampard debate.


But.....


Was it just me or did anyone else think that Gerard was a bit toilet for England in the last two games.

Surely if we are going to pick teams based upon those players who are currently in form then neither Gerard or Lampard would get in the side on current England Form.


Not really sure if I could take a midfield combination of 2 from Barry/Hargreaves/Jenas/Carrick but surely the criticism that have been justifiably leveled at FFL in recent seasons are starting more and more to apply to ickle Stevie G.

err... England looked so good in the last two international games, BECAUSE steven gerrard and gareth barry DOMINATED the midfield and had such a clear grip on the game, it gave the forward players the platform to attack... and all this mind you with a broken toe..

stevie g is not superhuman you know......


or is he ?

Steven Gerrard didn't 'dominate' either Israel or Russia. Both those games were there for Steven Gerrard to take an attacking influence on the England team, which he failed to do.

the broken toe bollox is just that, if it's such a problem, as I've said, why was he playing?

there are 10-a-penny midfielders who could have played equally as well as Gerrard did, Gerrard's meant to be world class, a step above that, isn't he?

In my eyes it was definitely Gareth Barry who did the dominating in the centre of the park.

Gerrard pretty much assisted Barry.

It was Barry who was the one tracking back and breaking up Russia's attacks, it was Barry who found a white shirt every time he had the ball.

This might be hard for Liverpool fans to take but it was Gareth Barry who made England tick. Gerrard didn't play badly, but he certatinly didn't shine.

I suspect that Fat Frank could've done as good (maybe better ?) a job as Gerrard did but I guess we'll never know.

Quite a few people have been saying that we shouldn't build up Barry too much as it was only Israel and Russia .......... but how many times have we seen Lamaprd and Gerrard (as a pair) struggle against even weaker teams.

Barry, for me, has to keep his place and then McClown has to decide which one of the other two (or three if you include Hargreaves) is to play alongside him. I fully expect this to be 'Stevie G' as he seems to be one of McClowns favourites.

What I liked about Bary's performances were that he wasn't in any rush to play a Hollywood pass. He kept it simple and if a 5 yard pass was the sensible one then he'd take it, rather than trying to find SWP from 50 yards - something that Gerrard (and Beckham beforehand) is looking to do too often.

Very good and fair assessment.

IMO It's seems to be the usual Liverpool fans bigging up Stevie "God" Gerrard but it was clear for all neutrals to see that it was in fact Gareth Barry that run the show for England. (Cue a Scouse outrage )

As MTTC has said Gerrard is supposed to be the world class midfielder but failed to show his world class against average opposition, while I agree he didn't have a mare he didn't really shine either.

But to be fair there were far worse performances on the night, a certain Rio Ferdinand had a shocker and scoring a goal at the death won't paper over his growing defensive frailties, it's time a younger more hungry player got a chance like J-Lo or Dawson.

for the record, I slated Rio Ferdinand ^^^^ further up this thread, I think my exact words were that he seemed intent on f*cking things up. he was absolutely awful, and his goal should not paper over the cracks of what was a dismal defensive display that verged on suicidal at times.

I didn't particularly think Ashley Cole was any good either. I thought he got caught out too often, and against a more potent attacking force he'd have been caught short and punished time and again.

I agree glyn, I'd go for Lescott to partner John Terry personally, he's definitely shown he has the potential to step up and give it a shot at international level.

am I the only one who can see Micah Richards as a central midfielder then? I reckon he'd be superb in the middle of the park.

Good point on Ferdinand Glyn, he didn't cover himself in glory. Both he and Terry were guilty of giving the ball oaway too cheaply and getting caught out of position too often.

Maybe this could've been a result of us being 2-0 up , but still not very professional of them. As I've said before, if Russia had a striker of Owen's calibre then there is no way we'd have kept a clean sheet.

IMO though, the poorest defensive display came from Ashley Cole - this was typified when he tried to run a ball out of play that you could see straight away wasn't possible instead of trying to find row Z he ended up putting our goal at serious risk.

I think Richards could make an excellent midfielder - maybe in the Vieira type role.

In fact Richards is such an athlete and seems to have all the boxes ticked (pace, pwer, skill on the ball, etc) that he could probably do a job anywhere on the park.

The only problem with being so versatile is that you can end up suffering, especially at international level.

I'd like to see Richards play at Man City as RB so he can have more experience in the role. We have more than enough good central defenders, but a chronic shortage of good full backs.

If Richards can continue to develop in the RB role then we could have one of the world's best on our hands in a few years.

I hope he stays fit and a right back personally, but that's just to keep Gary Chuckle out the team.

From the Independent....

Everyone who knows Gareth Barry says it will not happen, however prolonged the acclaim, but there is still the worry that he will wake up one morning soon with the conviction that he is not just a midfielder of genuine substance and fine professional instinct but also a star.

We all know the type of star. It is one who twinkles intermittently in an England team to which he belongs not because of a consistent body of work, the building of one fine performance upon another, but by right.

The concern has nothing to do with Barry's nature. His former manager Graham Taylor was saying at Wembley on Wednesday night, "He's a lovely modest, lad, and a professional right down to his boots" and his current manager, Martin O'Neill, loves his sense of team, his touch and stoic commitment. The Villa Park fans have long believed that he has been a neglected treasure, chanting "Gaz-Baz for England" as a matter of course.

No, the nag about the possible emergence of another kind of Gareth Barry is shaped rather by so many of the stark examples of a way of thinking and behaving which flies against the point of principle once underlined so memorably by the nation's one World Cup-winning manager, Sir Alf Ramsey.

It came when Geoff Hurst, the hat-trick hero of the 1966 final against West Germany, offered Ramsey a cheery farewell as the squad broke up after one of its first trips in the wake of the great triumph. "See you for the next game," said Hurst. "If selected," said his boss. Sir Geoffrey was never so presumptuous again – and nor were any of his heroic team-mates.

One of the glories of Barry – apart from the fact that he has finally made the point that Ramsey was also right when he said the art of building a winning national team was not to cherry- pick talent but to make a coherent blend of players who were naturally complementary – is that he appears to be a throwback to a time when playing for your country was something you did with pride and humility on a game-by-game basis.

You had boots and you were always ready to travel – "if selected". You didn't have some deep private debate about how well you had been treated or, as in the recent case of the now embattled David Bentley, whether you might prefer a sunshine break. You weren't elected to an exclusive club, one where the membership roll is reviewed no more frequently than at the annual meeting, if at all. You were there, ready for the call, and if the Wembley crowd booed you, as it did the '66 heroes after a goalless draw in the opening World Cup against the most cynical, ferocious defenders in the world, Uruguay, what could you do but play on and try to win the damn thing?

Contrast that self-effacing style – and the one displayed by Barry over the years during his sparse and staccato England career – with the style of a David Beckham, half-injured, commuting from California to London on the crazed project of playing two games, with 11 hours or so of air time, in less than 48 hours, one of them a friendly against Germany which would take him one step closer to his heart's desire, 100 caps for the country.

Run Barry's demeanour, also, past that of Frank Lampard, appalled at the temerity of the critics who attacked the lamentable efforts of himself and his team-mates in that last tournament? Lampard said he was entitled to more respect.

In all the years of Barry's exile from the England team – and the muddle that Sven Goran Eriksson and his successor, Steve McClaren, created in their desperate attempts to cater for the midfield requirements of such as Beckham, Lampard and Steven Gerrard, all of whom performed wretchedly in the 2004 European Championship finals – he produced not a peep of pro-*test*-('").

In the context of today's game there would have been sore temptation in someone less equable than the Villa man, and perhaps not least it would have come when, in the ultimate absurdity, Beckham was moved to a position in front of the back four. If there is any reassurance now, it is that Barry is unlikely to be easily jettisoned, even when Lampard and Owen Hargreaves return to fitness.

Barry, as he was against Israel a few days earlier when he assisted in two goals, was progressively huge against the Russians this week. His influence never slackened and he was markedly more effective than the talented but overstating Gerrard, who before the game announced that the current England squad was the best he had known – this on the back of a hitherto catastrophic qualifying campaign – and that the most significant moment on his own Road to Damascus had come when he scored two goals against Andorra.

The impact of Barry should not have been such a surprise to all those of us who never believed there was a compelling case for his inclusion in the team. Though he is far from showy – and even one of his warmest admirers, Taylor, admits that he lacks the change of pace which usually distinguishes sure-fire international players – he is a player of authority and excellent touch. Though the comparison is potentially burdensome, it is also true that Bobby Moore, a player of ultimate gravitas in a white shirt, could be slow to the point of loitering. However, Moore had a razored instinct for knowing where he should be at any moment. Barry, admittedly against opponents performing some way from the highest class, has shown a similar attribute and these last few days it has been easy to remember a fragment of his past.

When Aston Villa seized him from Brighton as a teenager, the aggrieved club produced expert witnesses at a tribunal called to assess his potential. One was John Giles, who knows quite a bit about what it takes to shape a midfield. He gave a resounding thumbs-up for a player who had an exceptionally wise football head on young shoulders.

Now that asset has been made plain to a much wider audience by Barry himself. It is one which, perhaps unlike the player, will not keep quiet if he should quickly find himself back in the shadows. Gareth Barry, unquestionably, has been eloquent in the place that matters most of all. He has done it on the field and his rewards should follow naturally.

Good piece of journalism.