adminSAO PAULO. — There were a few lessons to be learned at Arena de Sao Paulo on Thursday, but the most surprising was that English arrogance, at least of the soccer variety, is dead.Because here was England, the team that carries expectation, pressure and public demand heavier into World Cups than perhaps any other nation, being pushed to the brink of elimination and condemned to a second straight defeat.
And no one was angry. No one was conducting an inquest. And frankly, no one seemed surprised.
The country that claims to have invented modern soccer, sorry, football, has at last come to terms with the reality that its current national team just isn’t very good.
Admittedly, it is hard to think otherwise when you’ve come unstuck again, this time a 2-1 defeat to Uruguay thanks to a pair of Luis Suarez goals, but the English and their players, fans and media have long been masters of delusion.
Not any more.
“That’s football. We can’t complain about football,” goalkeeper Joe Hart said. “It was a brilliant game and I loved part of it. It was just not quite enough from us.”
Gone was the typical angst and sense of injustice and hard luck. England had just been outplayed by a better team, or perhaps more accurately, a brilliant individual in the mercurial Suarez. Hart admitted he felt “incredibly raw” but there no longer was the feeling that England had somehow been wronged or even that it had failed to live up to its potential.
Unless a dramatic and complicated sequence of events occurs – one which requires Italy to beat both Costa Rica yesterday and Uruguay on Tuesday and England to beat Costa Rica and then survive the goal differential sweepstakes – then the English will be bounced from the tournament with barely a whimper. — Soccernet.
Online Reporter