Originally Posted by Alfa Vincent
I think its the pressure of playing at home
Erm...
Spot the deliberate mistake
(clue: Where did we play Andorra)
In their defence, it is very easy to look bad against a team like Andorra, as arse-about-face as that may sound. They're playing with their entire team in defence, and space is at an absolute premium.
If you get an early goal, you can relax. But if you don't, then the pressure starts to mount. The mental state the England team were in when we played Andorra doesn't help with that. You absolutely need to remain patient, keep probing, keep playing intelligently.
Unfortunately, our team was led by John Terry, who started panicking about 15 minutes in. When your captain is playing horrible long balls from the halfway line which go straight out of play for a goal kick, it's not conducive to the right way of playing it.
It's not just England this happens to. Here are some recent results from around Europe which show the same type of thing:
Faroe islands 0 - 1 Romania
San Marino 0 - 2 Poland
Switzerland 1 - 2 Luxembourg!
Cyprus 1 - 2 Italy
Serbia 2 - 0 Faroe Islands
Spain 1 - 0 Bosnia
As counter-intuitive as it may seem the minnows can be a real test of character, if not so much of footballing quality. What England did wrong was to panic and therefore play stupidly.