
Originally Posted by
West Saxon
Overachieved, without a doubt. There's no way anyone would have expected to be in the semi-final, you'd have been laughed out the room if you'd said 4 weeks ago that England will get this far.
People say "England had an easy draw", but they ignore the fact that we've made very heavy weather of "easy" teams in the recent past. No game is easy for England, we're simply not good enough to be so arrogant as to say Tunisia and Colombia and Sweden are easy games. We've lost to Iceland, drawn with Algeria, drawn with the USA, with Slovakia, and Costa Rica in recent tournaments. Beating the "easy teams" is not guaranteed, and to actually beat them is positive.
As for those teams, why not. Anything can happen in knockout football, and it's not like England are Liechtenstein. France and Brazil have hardly been impressive, and if things had gone a bit better last night, we'd have killed Croatia off in the first half. Fine margins.