Apart from the Ref being a complete and utter T*** the England team just didn't play ( apart from Sol Campbell & Cole ).
David - posing **** *****- Beckham was walking around like a lost donkey! and thats no disrespect to donkeys everywhere because at least they can kick a ball.

Owen played ok but what the ****** hell was wrong with them all, they are all highly paid professionals who should be used to playing these games and should be doing much better against the likes of Portugal!

On that performance they deserved to go out, as for Beckham - it gets even worse as he has to go back to that pouting beast.

we still won though..

imagine if we'd played well.

i don't think it's a case of them not being arsed, more a case of the really high humidity getting to them . They are all fit athletes, but in the second half you could see the strain they were going through. I wouldn't usually agree with gerrard being taken off, but in this case he had to go off. he was knackered. I've never seen him in such a state. I think there were times when they played their souls out. I was really proud. Considering i always say i'm a Liverpool supporter not england, it says a lot.

Originally posted by Wavey
we still won though..

imagine if we'd played well.
Agreed - we might have actually scored enough goals to force the ref to allow us to keep one!

We won, plain and simple. We won - and they moments later were robbed of that win by a bent/biased/cheating/all three ref who all the way through gave everything against us.

If only we'd known back in Euro 96 that the host nation are allowed to get the refs to cheat for them - we would have won!

For the next tournament, England should go in with a goalkeeper. They went in without one this time. Why?

With any luck Chris Kirkland & Rob Green will be fit and ready for 2006 and fight it out for a place. Are there any other young english goalies out there? We need somone!!