England is the team to beat in this group. It's really hard to imagine them not winning the group. The recent loss of central defender and captain Rio Ferdinand will hurt their back line but they've still got John Terry, Ashley Cole and Jamie Carragher. Up front they've got goal scoring machine Wayne Rooney and the 8 feet tall Peter Crouch. But who needs forwards who can score goals when you've got Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard in the midfield. Both those guys are major threats to score goals.
England opens group play against the USA. I just hope we can keep the thrashing to within a goal. And if we can manage to score a goal I'll be thrilled. A 2-1 loss would not be too shabby against this England side. I'm encouraged by manager Bob Bradley's choice of forwards. Jozy Altidore was a lock for the squad. But the uncertainty for the other three spots was settled by Robbie Findley (who missed a completely open net in a friendly against Australia yesterday), Edson Buddle (who scored his first TWO international goals in the first half yesterday), and Herculez Gomez (his second international goal came yesterday, his first came against Turkey last week). Buddle has been on fire for club L.A. Galaxy recently and Gomez has been scoring up a storm with his Mexican club Puebla. He tied for the league's most goals in the season. This is first time we've got more than one striker who is a genuine scoring threat. Plus we'll have Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey in the midfield. Donovan's a good play maker and gets lots of assists and Dempsey has a great ability to score from the run of play.
Algeria, who miraculously edged out Egypt in qualifying to make it here, will likely get beat up in 3 straight losses.
Slovenia will be a tough opponent for the USA as is just about any European side that makes the World Cup. They finished second behind Slovakia in their qualifying group and then beat out Russia in the playoff. But they've played only two friendlies since the end of qualifying (wins over Qatar and New Zealand). The rest of their recent track record is an unimpressive set of losses against middling European teams.
England will open with a win over the USA and Slovenia will defeat Algeria the following day. Going into the 2nd match England will be in first place ahead of Slovenia on goal difference. The USA and England will both manage wins over Slovenia and Algeria, respectively, pushing the US into second place if we can score enough goals against Slovenia. England will pull out a third win against Slovenia and the US will defeat Algeria. That's the scenario I'd like to see, although it's far too clean to be realistic.
It's more likely the US will draw with Slovenia leaving us in third place on goal difference and desperately needing a big margin win over Algeria in the third match. Somehow I doubt we'll end up with the luck we had in last year's Confederations Cup where we needed a 3 goal victory over Egypt AND we needed Brazil to defeat Italy by 3 goals without conceding any to Italy. It all came together and we advanced to defeat Spain in the semifinal.
England 9
USA 4
Slovenia 4
Algeria 0
No comments:
Post a Comment