World Soccer: Pot, Kettle, Black

I think Brian's missed Trevor's point somewhat...To site Turkey, Denmark & Greece as examples of those who have 'surprised' everyone to do well is somewhat not addressing what Mr Brooking was saying. Yes those teams surprised us all but what MR B was trying to say was that England should observe the quality of the footy at Euro 2008 and realise how far behind we are and therefore not set our sights so high for the next tournament...in other words, we should be realistic! Yes we 'could' reach the semi's in 2010 a la Turkey etc, but it would be a fluke if we did and one shouldn't aspire to 'fluke' a tournament. Besides, England fans don't believe in flukes when it comes to major tournaments...if we qualify, then we're good enough to win...so the thinking goes. So called smaller nations like Denmark etc don't usually go into tournaments expecting to win them. They do look for flukes etc (NB I'm in no way saying that any of their successes were down to luck...they certainly weren't). In summary, Trev is trying to get us to lower our expectations and realise the effort required to properly be at a level to seriously compete. Brian seems to think that we should now 'need' to be in the semi's yet thinks the only way we'll get there is by a freak happening. Surely that's not setting a realistic goal at all?

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