‘Indecisive’ 3/10 England ‘offer too little’ and also have ‘unstoppable weapon’ to deliver World Cup glory | OneFootball

Schrodinger’s performance from England against Croatia. One apparently riddled with indecisive 3/10 players who offered too little yet which also saw the deployment of an ‘unstoppable weapon that can deliver World Cup glory’.

Mediawatch is well used to such over-reactions – it’s par for the England major tournament course. But you don’t usually get both ‘the sky is falling in’ and ‘It’s definitely coming home this time’ after one game.

Meanwhile, we’re left pondering just how different everything might look if Alan Pardew rather than Thomas Tuchel were England manager. Admit it, you’re thinking about it as well now.

Numbers game

Mediawatch and indeed this site in general have an issue with arbitrary player rating numbers. It’s why our own England player ratings contain no actual ratings.

What makes a performance a 7 rather than a 7.5? Nobody knows. There is no scientific formula. It is in the entirely arbitrary gift of the harassed and overworked reporter tasked with compiling them, usually as a second job after doing something much more important like a match report or deliberately misinterpreting the manager’s post-match quotes to make them seem spicier than they are.

It’s a throwaway job, basically, rarely given much attention but a thing that will never go away because people love numbers and arguing about numbers and thus ratings pieces get good, well, numbers.

So we’re not even going to get into Craig Hope’s miserabilist inability to read the room by dishing out 3s and 4s on the back of England’s ‘slightly wobbly’ 4-2 win over Croatia because we strongly suspect he’s neither the first nor last to be caught out by doing the bulk of his work during the first half when he was less busy elsewhere.

But come on. Two 3s and a 4 and a headline focused overwhelmingly on the negatives from what was perhaps England’s most fun World Cup win over truly serious opposition for a generation is taking glass-half-empty misery-gutsing to new levels. We get it must have been hard for Craig not being able to give Jude Bellingham a kicking on this occasion, but don’t take it out on poor Anthony Gordon.

Geordie first, English second is it, Craig?

Mind games

As ever, though, with Craig Hope it turns out to just be a skill issue. If you want to take a pop at Jude Bellingham after he dazzles in a 4-2 win over a team that’s made the final and semi-final at the last two World Cups, you absolutely can. You just have to be imaginative. And have no scruples.

Like, for instance, the Daily Mirror with this headline here.

Now, Mediawatch is aware we can get a bit precious about Bellingham because the UK media simply cannot be trusted when it comes to coverage of him. But we put it to you that there is only one reasonable inference from that headline: that the person speaking has changed the mind in a negative fashion because of what they saw from Bellingham, presumably recently.

Let’s acknowledge that someone has actually said something approaching those words, at least. That person is Didi Hamann, for what it’s worth.

But crucially not in that order and in precisely the opposite direction. The Mirror also, inevitably try to present this as new information. And not subtly or by omission – they flat out say it in the standfirst.

We do at least now have an acknowledgement of which way the mind has been changed, but it’s still bollocks.

The things Hamann didn’t like to see came during Bellingham’s Dortmund days. His mind was changed by Bellingham’s performances during his first season at Real Madrid. Which was 2023/24. Which was quite a long time before Bellingham playing well against Croatia yesterday and drawing further praise from Hamann.

There have been far worse stories and far bigger stitch-ups when it comes to Bellingham, but this one still rattles us perhaps specifically because this is a good news story about how Bellingham ‘came up big again for England’ and yet the temptation to still be weird about him remained irresistible.

If Bellingham can’t attract uncomplicatedly good and fair headlines after a performance like that, when will he ever?

Just an illusion

Alas, the Mirror are soon back to quoting absolutely nobody with this non-story about Croatia’s second goal.

Not even the handful of people they’ve found querying an uncomplicated and correct decision use the world ‘illusion’ at any point, and nor do the Mirror themselves outside the headline and picture caption.

And talking of that caption, we’re not really sure Ezri Konsa’s leg being initially hidden from view by Ivan Perisic’s body on the first replay we saw really counts as a ‘bizarre optical illusion’ when it is just an entirely standard element of how light travels and physics works.

We wonder how the Mirror’s journalists can get through the day when constantly faced by the bizarre optical illusions of things sometimes being behind other things. You could apparently blow these people’s minds by closing a door.

There was, of course, absolutely no controversy or serious suggestion of offside here once other angles and the VAR recreation image were shown, long before a story that required two journalists to cobble together hit the internet.

Even the very first apparently ‘baffled’ England fan quoted by the Mirror on an incident that apparently ‘sparked bewilderment’ in fact manages to summarise the entire situation far more succinctly and with far less fannying about than two (two!) professional journalists.

We’ll be honest, that fan doesn’t seem particularly baffled or bewildered, because there in two straightforward sentences is the entirety of this non-story.

Weapon of choice

Having complained about an unnecessarily miserable reaction to England starting their World Cup campaign with a 4-2 win over a genuinely good side, Mediawatch is now going to complain about an unnecessarily giddy reaction to England starting their World Cup campaign with a 4-2 win over a genuinely good side. Fight us.

To the Daily Express we must go for this choice cut.

The unstoppable weapon turns out to be – and we’re admittedly paraphrasing here a little bit – ‘lots of good attacking players in the starting XI and on the bench’. Which is definitely true, and the piece itself is largely fine and a touch more measured. But that is nevertheless a headline we’re going to file away for future reference if and when someone inexplicably manages to stop said weapon.

Wardrobe malfunction

Just a quick word on this Sun headline…

Not during the game, she didn’t. Megan Pickford’s suitcase went AWOL in transit, as suitcases are wont to do. We’re happy to report she was fully clothed throughout the game in Dallas despite having to ‘improvise’ by – gasp – wearing the same top she travelled in. It wasn’t a scene from the show Patrick Stewart pitched in Extras.

Understatement of the day

Courtesy of the Daily Star.