Ukraine 1-0 England Highlights: Blame it on Rio

Apologies for the predictable headline. But Mr. Ferdinand’s moment of Sunday league defending madness, which led to Robert Green’s sending off and should have led to Ukraine’s first goal (poor Shevchenko put the pen wide) seems to have more or less cost us this game.

As I say seems to, because I didn’t watch. Due to the fact that this game didn’t matter, and wasn’t easy to watch, I decided to catch the hastily arranged Match of the Day highlights. But Sky+ didn’t record it, and so that was the end of that. All I’ve seen is the highlights above, which seem to be from Ukrainian TV and so are understandably very Ukraine biased. Such is life.

So I can’t really offer any opinion about what happened in the game, but can offer this: Maybe it’s not a bad thing that we lost. Bare with me on this…

Our World Cup qualification campaign is still a massive success. To qualify with two games to spare is about as good as it gets for England. But if we’d gone though the group with a 100% record, then we’d probably have fallen under the very English spell of World Cup over-confidence. A spell that’s never broken until we play someone half-decent (like say Portugal) and get knocked out.

So maybe this defeat is a much needed reality check. Yes, we’re good. But we’re not Brazil 1970. We’re a team with a lot of positives, but we’re not perfect.

Still, would be nice to beat Belarus and finish with a win.