England line-up: Hart, G.Johnson, Jagielka, Terry (Dawson, HT), A.Cole (Gibbs, HT), Barry, Lampard (Zamora, HT), Walcott (A.Young, HT), Gerarrd (Wilshere, 82'), A.Johnson, Rooney (Milner, 66')
Hungary line-up: Kiraly, Liptak (Komlosi, 55'), Vanczak (Laczko, 46'), Juhasz, Szelesi, Vadocz, Dzsudzsak (Koman, HT), Rudolph (Priskin, 83), Elek (Toth, 59'), Gera, Huszti (Hajnal, HT)
Three days before the Premier League starts and the FA (not FIFA) decide our international flops should play a meaningless friendly. Thus interrupting all preparation for the new season which I'm sure all the Premier League managers were happy about. I may have accepted the idea of playing this friendly if one of two conditions were met; we played our flops against someone who we weren't guaranteed to beat i.e. someone in the top 20 or 30 in the world, not a team who are currently ranked 62nd in the World with one player at Fulham , one at QPR and another ex-Crystal Palace goalkeeper the rest are unknowns. Or play a team like Hungary with a completely new look team to actually scout for new English talent.
However as it turned out we actually needed our flops to beat the lowly Hungary and come from behind albeit a goal that clearly shouldn't have been. All the tabloids and media personnel are now all praising England for a much better performance and a good game. Now playing Hungary you would expect a better performance because they're so low in the rankings (behind Scotland and Gabon!) so I'm not surprised the performance was better. But it still wasn't fantastic and against a better team England would have been punished for some defensive errors and a lot of slack passing. It took till the second half before captain Gerrard provided two strokes of ingenuity to save England from the boo-boys. What has also made me laugh is that people have gone on to say that it's more like our 'brilliant' World Cup qualifying display. Now again lets take it into perspective; we played Andorra (minnows), Kazakhstan (minnows), Belarus (minnows) all of whom England should be thrashing five or six nil, we also had Ukraine (their only named players were Shevchenko whose best were well and truly behind him and Voronin who was a massive flop at Liverpool) and Croatia (who again you expect England to win against even though they are an up-and-coming nation).
So before anyone shouts about how great we are going to be in the European Championships qualifiers lets again put it into perspective; we start against Bulgaria (whose best player Berbatov has retired form international football and are ranked 43rd), then we have Wales (who apart from Bellamy tend to look towards lower league players and are ranked 84th), then Montenegro (who don't have the better players of Serbia & Montenegro before they decided to split and are ranked 73rd), finally the only possible challenge England should face is against fellow World Cup qualifiers Switzerland (who beat World Champions Spain and are ranked ten places behind England in 17th) so if we don't qualify it will be a damn right shambles. One final note of the pointless friendly is that Arsenal's Kieron Gibbs and Ashley Young looked very good when they came on at half-time.
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