Should Sven continue as England manager?

[PeterH]

Now the dust has settled and everybody has had a good think, do you think Sven is the right man to manage England?

[brighton_eagle]

I don't think so, for the reasons I've given on other threads. We need a strong manager willing to make difficult decisions.....Sven doesn't seem ready to do that. We also need someone with a more attacking outlook.

[Dave]

I hope he stays

[Aki Aki Aki]

If Sven goes then surely we will lose Sir ID. Therefore Sven must stay.

[Murley]

i think he shold stay but change his tactics

[PengeEagle]

He should stay as there is no one english to replace him with at the moment. Maybe they should appoint someone as his no 2 so he can groom him as his successor?

[Noodles 42]

Originally posted by Murley
i think he shold stay but change his tactics

I think he's tactically poor and should go.

[JamieBcpfc]

We have a mediocre manager being payed £4,000,000 a year, he never has impressed me it is time for a change

[oz_da II]

Keep it going, Sven.

[ReadingPalace]

I think he's basically picking the right team, but too many years spent managing in Italy has made him overly defensive.

Hopefully he will have learnt from his experiences over the past couple of weeks and we can progress to making more of a serious challenge in Germany in two years time. A poor qualifying campaign in what is, on paper, a relatively easy group and he will be rightly out on his ar*e, though.

I voted 'Yes', for now at least. There's no obvious successor, anyway

[henryhallandhisbasque]

It's easy to pick on soft targets like SGE and DB. We should remember that we were screwing up penalty competitions under English managers like BR, TV and GH. We should also remember that England has won nothing since 1966, under God knows how many English coaches since then.

What we should be doing is looking into the reasons why our so-called top class footballers seem so uncomfortable with and generally incapable of spending time on the ball, and why so few established world class foreign players opt to play in the Premiership. Yes, we got people like PV and TH at Arsenal, but they were persona non gratas at their previous clubs..

We spend half our time on here speculating about which players we'd like Dowie to buy. How many of these are English-qualified? We are not alone in doing this as a club. Sven had about five goalkeepers to choose from who were playing regular first-team Premiership football. We, like most other clubs these days, seek non-English players to become our No.1 Premiership keeper, yet we have the cheek to moan about James.

England fans are generally such hypocrites. They moan about the failings of the national team, but are happy to see their club sides' first team squads packed full of non-English players..

You only have to see how young players are coached in England to see the failings in our system. But we only seem to want to blame a Swede, for diabolical training methods over decades in this country.

[GladItsAllOver]

He should have had the "bottle" to take Beckham off against Portugal, knowing he wasn't fully fit and off the boil, but he never seems to want to upset anyone, Figo got taken off and look where they are now!

if we dont qualify for WC2006 he`ll be gone

[YASSA the PALACETINIAN]

Originally posted by PengeEagle
He should stay as there is no one english to replace him with at the moment. Maybe they should appoint someone as his no 2 so he can groom him as his successor?

Yeah, I hear Alan Smith and Trevor Francis are open to offers.

I voted yes simply because there is no one better than him and likely to be available.

Let's wait a few years and hope that an Englishman rises to the top of the managerial pile who can take over. Steve Bruce perhaps?

Yes keep him!

[PeterH]

Originally posted by henryhallandhisbasque
It's easy to pick on soft targets like SGE and DB.

The Manager and Captain on the field, soft targets?

[firesign]

Yes he should stay, but mainly (and sadly) because there is no one better available at the moment. I also don't think now is the right time to change things. However, he should go after the 2006 WC regardless of what happens there and the FA should start making plans to find a successor.

And can I be the first to predict that England will reach the quarter finals of the World Cup?

[limited_edition]

No. He'll never change. He is the Trevor Francis of international football management.

[Brian Potter]

Unless Arsene Wenger becomes available (Dowie is the only real candidate but he's otherwise engaged) then I can see no better candidate than Sven in spite of his faults.

That said, perhaps not enough emphasis has been placed on the Chelseagate scandal and it's role in our summer failure. Lest we forget the Lazio debacle caused by the FA's negotiations with Sven. The Rome club were having a fairly productive season before their form became abysmal. So bad in fact that the decision was made to relieve Sven of his duties early rather than make him see out his contract.

Sven's main motivational tool is the trust that he engenders in his charges. This was shot to pieces at Lazio (after guarantees that he'd stay) and perhaps we are seeing the seeds of this particular downfall being sown with our national team.

I would question his decision to have wives and girlfriend's accompany the squad in Portugal. There appears to be a great divide between the England captain and his wife at this time and I don't think that having them couped up together in a hotel for three weeks has been Sven's greatest inspiration.

One would hope that Sven can learn from the mistakes and errs that he has made during Euro 2004. My fear is that he cannot (after the France defeat, watching the Portugal game was akin to Groundhog Day). Even more alarmingly, tentative signs show that the players no longer believe in Sven, his tactical plan nor his ability to coax the optimum performance from them.

One thing is for sure though... Sven is unlikely to walk of his own volition having just signed that lucrative contract extension. And what of the FA? Backed into a corner by Roman's billions and Sven's roving eye, it surely won't be long before the mud is thrown in their direction.

[Twyford Bee]

We kept faith in Kevin Keegan after much worse in 2000. I missed the majority of the Portugal game due to exam commitments but I thought our faliure was all Urs Meier's fault, and not Sven's?

I can't see any reason for his replacement to be English, we need the best man for the job and no English manager is currently proving themselves to be good enough for the job at the moment. I agree that Wenger is the most obvious candidate, if he were prepared to do it.