England did ok, but that doesn't make it acceptable. If we are to win a major tournament and compete with the very best there's a number of changes that need to be made and it needs to be done at grass roots level. I've been around junior football for a few years now due to my son and some of the things I've experienced show me that until there's a big changes in attitudes we will NEVER compete for major honours. I could go into my experiences but the post would be long and boring. Lets just say that first and foremost it appears to be about the size of the kids and the necesity to win and not technical ability. Before anyone says anything, no my son doesn't play for a cr@p team and has won his league for the last three years, but they have done it by playing good passing football and they are not a big team by any stretch of the imagination. 
Some changes are coming into affect in the next two years or so whereby they are scrapping 11 a side up until 13 or 14 and up to these ages they are playing 9v9 with more realistic size goals. This is something that will make a huge difference and allow players more time on the ball etc but this will take a generation before we even see the benefit.
As for the game the other night, I'm no tacticion but if someone had man marked Pirlo the other night Italy wouldn't have had any other option that I could see.
That is what I said and for me shows how poor the whole management set up at England is, not just Woy.
Italy player for player are no better or worse than us to be honest, they also have a lot of younger players coming through the ranks , like we do.
All game Pirlo could do what the hell he wanted and if Italy had took the chances he had created, they could of won the game at ease , but for some unknown reason, Woy decided that despite playing 11 behind the ball for 70 odd mins, no one should mark Pirlo out of the game.
We was pretty sh!te all tournament to be honest, only Ireland and Greece had less possession on average than England. We had a awful 39% average ball possession during the tournament, which is not good enough really is it.
To show just how poor we are with the ball, we even made less passes than Holland and Russia, despite us playing for 120 minutes more than them and we only average 3 shots or less on target in 4 games.
So some people can say we did well with the players we had, I think we did pretty shocking
