It was strange watching England play against Montenegro the other night. The atmosphere was great with all those fans crammed into a League Two stadium, that bloke with a megaphone and of course the obligatory ‘Welcome to the Balkans’ flare. Actually, thinking about it, it wasn’t actually that strange. Having seen England beat both Spain and Brazil in recent friendlies we should absolutely expect them to freeze in a game where the pressure is on, it’s what they do, right?

I’m usually a big fan of the floppy owl ‘Hootmaster Hodgeson’  or by his human name ‘Roy’ but the blame for the draw unfortunately does fall to him in this case. A couple of weeks ago we watched as Manchester United tried in vain to face off Real Madrid with ten men, that game was changed by the decision of the referee and the decision of Jose Mourinho moments after. Nani was shown a dubious red card opening up space on the wing that stretched United’s midfield opening up plenty of space in front of the defence, Mourinho opted against his original decision to bring on Benzema and brought on Modric, to exploit this new opening in front of the defence. Modric smashed one in making Jose look damn good in the process. My point is that Mourinho read the game and changed with it, Roy stuck to the plan when the game could have been swung in England’s favour.

When Montenegro swapped to a system with four attacking players why was there not a move to bring on a defensive midfielder such as Parker in place of Cleverley? This would have allowed Gerard to advance and save his legs for attacking where we need him to control the play instead of recovering from running around like a man possessed in defence. Hodgeson is an international manager and I’m a bitter-blogger so he obviously understands the team far better than I, but the point isn’t what he did, it’s the fact that he did nothing. England needed a small change to upset Montenegro’s understanding of the balance, perhaps some experience in midfield in the form of Lampard or Parker? They needed something, and Roy froze. The team got stage fright and conceded a goal we all saw coming.

Roy has got to take the next game by the balls and not treat these teams with the respect he’s been giving them, England (like it or not) are one of the best international sides in the world. We don’t perform well at competitions but we’re better than all but a few of the other world teams but shaking that ingrained feeling of underachievement isn’t going to happen any time soon if Roy doesn’t come out of his shell and make some big decisions.

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