England On The Verge And Gunning For Revenge

Tomor­row night Eng­land can put the heartache of miss­ing out on a place in the Euro­pean Cham­pi­onships behind them by qual­i­fy­ing for the World Cup next sum­mer.  They take on Croa­tia, at Wem­b­ley, know­ing a win would guar­an­tee them a place in South Africa and to add some extra spice to an already hot encounter – the Eng­lish also have a cause for revenge.

The venue was the same when Eng­land met Croa­tia in Novem­ber 2007.  The sit­u­a­tion, how­ever, was very dif­fer­ent.  England’s hopes of qual­i­fy­ing for the Euro­pean Cham­pi­onships hung in the bal­ance head­ing into the game, with Croatia’s 3–2 vic­tory end­ing their hopes before the tour­na­ment had even kicked off.  This time a vic­tory will secure England’s place in South Africa and even if Croa­tia win Fabio Capello’s side will still hold the advan­tage hav­ing played a game less and cur­rently being four points ahead of Slaven Bilic’s Croatia.

Liv­er­pool cap­tain Steven Ger­rard wore the captain’s arm­band in 2007, and he explained that it was his “worst moment in an Eng­land shirt.”  Recent reports have also sug­gested the Croats mocked the Eng­lish at the end of the game (to be fair, you’d have to wouldn’t you?), which should spur Eng­land on and make this a crack­ing game.  Ger­rard hinted that there was extra cause for revenge in the back of his mind.

He said:  ““There is unfin­ished busi­ness for all of us,

“It hurt. We still remem­ber the feel­ing after­wards in the dress­ing room. We remem­ber the result and will use it to moti­vate our­selves on Wednesday.

“If you can’t get moti­vated to beat a team to get to the World Cup then you’ve got a problem.”

With home advan­tage in their favour and a record of seven wins in seven games it is easy to see why Eng­land are the heavy favourites with the World Cup bet­ting odds.  How­ever, Croa­tia have some truly fan­tas­tic play­ers in their midst’s. Arsenal’s Eduardo is capa­ble of upset­ting even the most for­mi­da­ble of defences while the likes of Niko Kran­j­car, Luka Mod­ric, Ivica Olic and Nico Kovac are all very tal­ented players.

Slaven Bilic admit­ted he is not expect­ing a repeat of the 2007 encounter and believes Eng­land are a lot stronger under Fabio Capello.

“Under Capello they have become the kind of team who can win any­where. They have been a bit unfor­tu­nate with injuries, but Capello has man­aged to bring the best out of them.” Bilic told the Tele­graph newspaper.

In another inter­view with a dif­fer­ent pub­li­ca­tion, The Peo­ple mag­a­zine, he said: “It was a mag­nif­i­cent night for us but it will be a lot harder this time because Eng­land are a much bet­ter team than they were then.

“They were with­out John Terry, Rio Fer­di­nand and Wayne Rooney, and there was a lot of pres­sure on them and none on us because we knew we had qual­i­fied. Now we’re aware we are prob­a­bly play­ing for sec­ond place in the group behind Eng­land. If you offered us a point now, we would accept it.”

Bilic may be being coy over his side’s chances.  In truth the fact Eng­land have won all their games is a lit­tle flat­ter­ing con­sid­er­ing some of the per­for­mances.  How­ever, they deserve to sit at the top of the group and a win tomor­row will secure their place in South Africa.  I doubt I’ll be bet­ting on them win­ning the tour­na­ment when it all kicks off next sum­mer, but it will at least be nice to see us at the World Cup!