First up: Croatia.
Croatia:
Goalkeeper: Stipe Pletikosa, a regular in the Croatian national team and the first-choice goalkeeper since the 2002 World Cup (although he was injured for much of Euro 2004). Hasn’t made many mistakes since his Under-21s days.
Defence: On the right, Manchester City’s summer signing Vedran Corluka will turn out for Croatia. He’s 6′4″, athletic [...]

This is only going here because it’s one of my personal axes, but Martin Samuel in The Times has written a brilliant article explaining why English players aren’t as good as their European and South American counterparts. I’ve written about this before on TheOffside.com (check it out here) but Martin Samuel makes a particular persuasive [...]

Steve McClaren still won’t reveal his starting 11 for tomorrow’s match against Croatia, but that isn’t going to stop me speculating.
Goalkeeper: The Times is reporting that Paul Robinson has performed abysmally in training, which probably means Scott Carson will get his first competitive start for England. The Guardian has the same story, but goes further [...]

Football365.com columnist John Nicholson thinks that the FA should create a new Championship team – England FC – made up entirely of young English players, to serve as a means of training young players outside of the usual system. Is it genius or just batshit?

Hello all – I’m the new guy. My name is Matthew and I’ll be taking over the England coverage here on WorldCupBlog.org. I’m a soon-to-be postgrad at England’s University of Sheffield, although I’m currently in Perú and will be in Belgium for much of December. Elsewhere on the Web, I’m the Leeds United blogger over [...]

Steve McClaren’s having a rough week. As if all the injuries aren’t bad enough, he’s got the likes of Tony Adams comparing him to Graham Taylor in certain newspapers. But if he gets six points from the next two games (Israel on Saturday, Russia on Wednesday) then things will look a lot brighter and failed [...]

Best manager in the world!

I swear this has never happened before. Not under Sven, not under Kevin “tactics?” Keegan, not even under Graham Taylor. But for some reason, a small part of me wants England to lose today, just so Steve McClaren can get the sack. Is that wrong?

So called “super-agent” Pini Zahavi has claimed that the reason for England’s dismal World Cup was jealousy of David Beckham.
“The problem in the World Cup was that the players gave only 30% of their ability," said Zahavi. "That was because there was a big problem of jealousy inside the team. It’s something that nobody else [...]

According to The Independent, Stevie Mac is having informal dinner meetings with all the England players to discuss what went wrong against Croatia (and Macedonia), and what they’re going to do next.