The whole point about this run is that the England players and management have been pretty modest about their abilities and just happy to have a chance. Obviously the fans are going to go wild at the prospect of maybe reaching a friggin’ World Cup FINAL - it’s not arrogance - it’s enjoying a heat wave, having drinks, creating memes, getting in the spirit of things, throwing reason and logic in the trash, rustling the cynics and sour grapes in the process while we have fun, enjoying the damn occassion. Yes IKEA was too far but it’s been a fun ride. No one claimed to be better than brazil but our world cup in every department is >*10^1000000000000000000000 than neymar and co who were so desperate they thought conning the ref for penalties in a VAR environment could actually work.

Honestly if croatia win tomorrow on penalties, I wouldn’t be surprised to see ‘well they got an easy draw, couldn’t win a proper game in 90 minutes etc etc etc’

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What was the score today btw?

does anyone actually care about the 3rd place matches? FIFA should just stop doing them, **** it. not even the teams give a ****. it was the only match I didn't watch during this world cup.

The teams should at least have the decency to play a carefree superoffensive game to make the 3rd place game watchable like a friends of Ronaldo vs friends of Zidane game that ends in a 8-5 score or something.

Your loss guys, it was a very fine game well worth watching. One of the more attractive ones this wc.

Its close. Brazil dominated Mexico but drew with Switzerland. England dominated Sweden but drew with Colombia.
Brazil won it late against Costa Rica, England won it late against Tunisia.
I give the edge to England because they won the PK shootout against Colombia.

If we go by ELO we need to discount the two meaningless losses England had against Belgium. I will do it afterwards and report results.

no need,
brazil >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> lolengland

Yes I actually do enjoy watching two teams with some good players play each other.

Kdb and hazard playing with each other? Nah let me skip that.

According to my method Brazil had a 2000ish performance and England had 1980ish. So Brazil slightly better. I did say that was debatable though
I also did Spain for curiosity and they have 1900ish( Im accounting for the fact that Russia played at home).

As basic guideline Spain are number 4 in the ranking with 2010 points and Croatia number 5 with 1973. Lol England is number 10 with 1914.

So England performed like a number 5 this World Cup while Spain performed like a number 10. Those are the raw data and I dont really give a **** about your UEFA cat fights. Unless you want to actually count the two Belgium games which is completely ridicoulous but you can do if you cant handle the (correct) narrative that England had a good, not great, tournament.

Is that discounting 2 of their 3 losses? If you consider every game and consider that Brazil ran bad and England ran about as expected I estimate your method would have Brazil at 3000ish and England 300ish

Im not counting the PKs England won against Colombia and those were far more meaningful than both Belgium losses combined.

If no one really cared about England they would be capable of seeing its coming home for what it actually is, and not what you see it as.

Only if "around the world" means in England and the USA.

What got some of us gleeful to see England lose was the it's coming home nonsense. It's like these people have no sense of shame.

Yup, that's basically it. I was indifferent to England at the start of the wc but started rooting against them just because of the annoying "its coming home". It was never funny and it was everywhere. The "it's just a joke" excuses change nothing. If it's serious you're delusional and if it's a joke it's not funny, so...
Anyways, glad it's over.

Guys, you gave it your all but it just wasn’t good enough against the best squad in this WC.
Rating it two lions outta three.

it was kinda the opposite for me. the hype and the memes were great, but england winning would actually be annoying. it was all fun until it started being serious

thing is, i bet portugal and uruguay etc have their own chants and sing-songs about futbol a casa muy bueno or whatever, but 0 tosses are given and no mowers are launched because no1 cares 1/1000th abt those countries' fortunes as compared with england

Baids resorting to recycling Peteblows ****ty arguments except that he could think of examples, maybe it really would have been better if it went home

Thanks a lot gary lineker

an england win would obviously have been the best for #content

something that makes a big group incredibly happy and a much bigger group extremely annoyed is going to produce the best content. just like a liverpool or spurs league title. it's much better than a nice underdog story like a croatia win, which most people would like but few people would really care about a month from now

it would just annoy me personally

er beg your pardon

one thing tho cos we've had similar arguments about leicester - underdog croatia win would be boring because they are decent. 33/1 pre tournament, same as arsenal's PL odds this year
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if it was saudi arabia in the final **** then would be off the charts

The bolded bit seems like the same tune:

its mostly tongue in cheek (entirely when it started ldo as we were supposed to get stomped and embarassed in this tourney, germany style), but i reckon there's a small part of every english fella that will always believe its coming home every time. just like there's a small part of every france fan that believes le football tres bien dans maison in perpetuity. and indeed im sure they have little tunes to that effect

but no1 cares about france or the french so no1 gets perturbed about it