England 2-2 Czech Republic: The Positives and Negatives

Another weak performance by England, Defeated by the Czech Republic. Fabio Capello’s team struggles at home once again.

Here’s my take on who took something out of the game and who left with more questions than answers.

Positives:

Wes Brown - Played well throughout crossing the ball more often than David Beckham who played poorly. Scored England’s first goal of the game with a nice header powering himself into the box.

Steven Gerrard - Once again played out of position wide left, but was still effective. Arguably England’s best player of the night showed great passing ability and bust to get into the opposing box.

Joe Cole - Came on and lifted the tempo of England’s play. Scored a lucky equalizer in the 91st minute, showed skill and gave England something different, running at defenders and getting to the bar-line.

Negatives:

David Beckham - Got the assist for the first goal but other than that had a poor game, overshooting crosses and poor from set plays. He didn’t have the ambition to get into more advance positions to cross the ball and seemed happy just lobbing it in from 30 plus and forty yards away making it easy for the Czech defence. Has he played his last game for England?

Frank Lampard - Didn’t have much of an impact at all in the centre of midfield couldn’t get forward and lacked that ‘edge’. The ‘Boo Boys’ came back off when he was substituted.

David James - Conceded two goals, should have done better dealing with the free-kick from Marek Jankulovski as he was beaten on his side, ideally he should have been closer to the post and dared the Czech hit-man to try and get it up and over the wall. James then ran out of his goal and was beaten to the ball by Vaclav Sverkos. Sverkos could have left James embarrassed but put his poor effort wide.

Finally the rest of the England squad need to take a good hard look at themselves before taking on Andorra and Croatia. Fabio Capello’s tactics were somewhat confusing at times with players playing out of position and Wayne Rooney not looking like he knew exactly where he was playing.

With an away game at tough European outfit Croatia, England better find some sort of solution quick otherwise they could be in for a very nasty surprise.