Match Review & Highlights: England 0 – Algeria 0

June 18th, 2010 | by: chris | View Comments

One of these teams is going to be really disappointed with the result, the other will be positively giddy. No prizes for guessing which is which.

The myth of this new England now seems well and cooked after witnessing a dismal affair which wasn’t pretty on the eyes of the neutral, and probably wasn’t particularly aesthetic for anyone not waving their flag behind the Algerian line. Neither side were particularly close to scoring and the whole thing had that drab inevitability of a nil-nil draw into the second half.

The story coming in on both sides, of course, was the keeper position. Both coaches decided second chances are for non-World Cup games and took out their keepers, instead preferring David James and Rais M’Bolhi.

Didn’t really matter a whole lot. Neither team had a glittering chance, shook the woodwork or could fall back on dodgy refereeing – Algeria were better than expected, England were worse than expected, and they met somewhere in the middle for a nil-nil draw.

The only thing of note, really, is how little of note there was, particularly from England’s “one man show”, Wayne Rooney. Karim Zaini looked brilliant and Algeria were a more technical side, a much better side than the one which took on Slovenia in the first match (although Slovenia’s tactics were largely responsible), but the game was lacking in many, many areas.

The result obviously favors Algeria, as without it their World Cup was over. Now it sets up a four-way horse race on the final day with the group structured like so:

[The tie-breakers run goal differential, goals scored and head-to-head.]

There was one interesting thing which happened, actually: at the end of the game while England fans were booing the team, Wayne Rooney looked into the camera and said “Nice to see your own fans booing you, you football ’supporters’.”

So at least that’s something fresh to keep the papers churning.