I might be remembering wrong, but I think Guti hardly ever played for Spain, sure I remember questioning why he wasn't in their team yet played well for Madrid.

On Gerrard, I agree, it won't surprise me if he retires after this tournament and concentrates on his club.

That's just rubbish ... the top players have to play against top players every week in the premiership and the champions league etc.
Both Italy and Uruguay are ranked higher than us and the conditions would have suited them more. It's a very tough group and I don't think we've disgraced ourselves .. the results were both close. The Italy game was one of the best I've seen England play. Brazil aren't exactly setting the place alight.

^^which is worrying because they top their group

I don't mind boring football as long as we're good at it, and we're not. Germany don't play what I would call "beautiful football" thats more the Dutch, but by christ they do it well.

They're both getting stick but they're rightfully not alone. Of course some fans have club-centric agendas but the bottom line is both were poor in one respect or another as were most of the players. Not all their fault, as the team balance and chemistry contributes, so Hodgson has to take a large chunk of responsibility.

Rooney is not Suarez and Gerrard is not Pirlo - they cannot be forced into those roles without compromise.

So enough of this "my player is less to blame than your player" garbage and let's just look at the bigger picture - a picture that will probably feature neither. Or Hodgson.

Not exactly ... Mexico, Croatia and Cameroon are way below Brazil in FIFA' s rankings ... they're quite a way below England too so Brazil should be steaming ahead.
Italy and Uruguay are both above England in the rankings ... only Costa Rica are below. It is a pretty horrendous group ... the worst most probably.
Spain have under achieved far more than us ... not that that's much of a consolation

Nope, it was down to 2 dozy defenders admiring the view, the same as the first goal

Rooney semi-flopped he missed some gilt edged chances that you would expect supposed world class players to take, but I thought his overall play was good against Uruguay. Gerrard has developed a nasty habit of setting up the opposition at crucial moments. Never understood why he was so feted in his new Liverpool role, they conceded 50+ goals with him 'covering' their back four.

Still not convinced gerrard will step aside.

Two months time before the Switzerland game same old, the lads are buzzing etc.

I think blaming one or two men when there are 11 on a team is stupid, England as a whole played badly last night. Gerrard was poor admittedly but where was everybody else when that second goal happened? Rooney missed a couple of chances admittedly but at least he pulled it back. As a team they played terribly last night. In my very limited opinion lol, I'm sure people will let me know if I got it all wrong lol.

No they didn't, he didn't move into that role until January.

Can't blame Rooney alone as he played well in the last match despite missing some chances.

I wouldn't blame Gerrard alone as it appears that it was the entire defence in this world cup which has been our achilles heel, and poor man to man marking throughout the team.

We looked very good in certain areas at times, but this hid our flaws.
And obviously, we just didn't score enough goals from good chances we had.
Poor concentration and lack of focus too worked against us.
Actually there's a list growing now so I'll just stop there.

I couldn't blame England's world cup on just one man.

There's no doubt Gerrard was poor but so was Jagielka and although Johnson played a role in the goal he simply isn't good enough most of the time.

Thought Cahill did OK and so did Rooney but in the end we simply don't have enough
flair or naturally skilled players to compete with the best - although how that explains
the Spanish teams dismal performances I don't know.

England going out didn't surprise anyone but Spain's performances, by contrast, surely did.

Let's face it we are worse than bosnia.

I don't think any England player emerged from last night's game with any credit.

We were poor in every area of the pitch. I have to say that I'm really worried about our defence. If that back four is considered to be our best and the foundation we have to build on for the future, we are in deep shit.

I don't think you can blame him for the flick on winner last night...no one would've stopped Suarez there at that flick's speed. Jagielka did make that great goal line clearance too v Italy. Poor show from all generally.

Hoddle was last night giving his views and said that Hodgson should continue. Fair enough. Then he was asked about Gerrard and Lampard and should they call it a day for England? He replied how old is Pirlo? He was adamant it would be a big mistake to for either to retire or get axed. He was talking sense up to that point.

You're right, it was only Raul. Guti, however was the Spanish Robbie Savage, he was hated by every other team, the only difference being he was a quality player.

Cahill seemed to be the only one doing anything in defence. Jagielka and Baines were just not able to step up to the level required. The sad thing is that these two are currently the best we have for these positions (excluding international retirees Terry and Cole). So the defence is going to be our achilles heel for the foreseeable future.

I agree with that. I think that a lot had to do with the way the cards were dealt this time around. I believe that we are in the toughest group by far. Normally you'd expect to have to face one hard team in the opening group round, but we had two. These are teams you'd expect to face in the later rounds after qualifying out of your group. But not two in the group stages.
Looking at some of the other groups Group H looks like a piece of piss compared to England's group. Groups C and E also look more like the makeup of groups we usually end up in.

Looking back at earlier recent World Cups we've been put into groups that look very easy on paper and we made then look like really hard work. Scraping through with draws and one win against teams we'd expect to beat.

This was a really hard group. The hardest I can remember, and I think a lot has to do with the order we have faced teams and how early we had to meet them.