Today is crunch day for England in the world cup
It’s their match in the last 16 against Ecuador at 4pm.
While the team can take heart at winning the group, things have not gone well in the tournament.
They looked ordinary in the opening match, beating Paraguay 1-0 with an own goal from their defenders
Lacklustre against Trinidad & Tobago until the last 10 minutes when it seemed to dawn on them that they needed to win
Drawing against Sweden was a real downer, but not nearly as bad as losing Michael Owen in the first 3 minutes with a knee injury. He hadn’t looked fit in the previous two matches either.

England coach Sven Goran Eriksson’s decision to bring 4 strikers (two of which were injured to start with) is now beginning to look foolish, to the extent that he is going to have to change the team’s formation from it’s usual 4-4-2 formation (4 defenders, 4 midfielders and 2 strikers) to a rather odd one: 4-1-4-1 which doesn’t really have a name, as it is a variation on the 4-5-1 but with one of the midfielders dropping back. And as the title suggests, the best name i’ve heard given to it is the “Musketeer Formation”. Why? Because it’s

One Four All and All Four One

I’ve tried to find a photo of the 4-1-4-1 but have failed and my scanner is throwing a strop
So, you’ll have to settle for 4-4-2:

and 4-5-1:

To get 4-1-4-1 you need to drop the defensive midfielder further back into a position inbetween the midfield and the defenders. You would also push the centre midfielders up, allowing a flat 4 midfield in front of the 4-1 at the back, and then the lone striker

4-4-2 has become a bit of a standard formation in modern football, and 4-5-1 is what was used by the Brazillian champions of the 2002 world cup

Michael Carrick is expected to play in the defending “midfield” role and Wayne Rooney will play as the lone striker. He will get support from Beckham, Lampard Gerrard and Joe Cole who will be the line of 4 attacking midfielders who will provide the balls through.

The best attacks are expected to come down the left wing from Ashley Cole who will play on the left of the line of 4 defenders (the other three likely to be Owen Hargreaves on the right and John Terry & Rio Ferdinand in the middle). The two coles (who are not related) have provided the best through balls and it was Joe Cole who produced the 2nd goal against England.

It is a huge gamble by Sven, but he doesn’t have too many other options.
He has Peter Crouch, but he will need to keep someone in reserve in case Rooney gets injured as Rooney himself isn’t 100% after recovering from his Broken Metatarsal injury

There is one other striker who is fit, but he is more of a right winger and has never played a full international match (other than the England B fixture against Hungary which i don’t think counts). I am of course referring to 17 year old Theo Walcott. Players cannot be added to the squad mid-tournament so it is hard to see where to go from here if they overpower Ecuador – who are a strong team and have had no real problems reaching the last 16.

If it is looking good 3/4 of the way through the match and England have a 2-0 lead, Sven may consider bringing Walcott on to see how he can use him, but in reality he’s unlikely to play any real part in the competition.

I don’t want to be too pessimistic, but I don’t like the look of this formation, but if it comes off it could potentially win them the tournament

Completely unrelated, I’ve disabled the views plugin until i can figure out why it randomly stopped working as it was beginning to annoy me