Great goal from Joe Cole, absolutely brilliant!

England's defending from set pieces tonight was dreadful, absolutely woeful. You expect better from them.

Also, Stevie G is the man!

Being an Everton fan, I really want to dislike Gerrard. In fact I want to hate him.....but I can't - the guy's just too good

Peter Crouch, on the other hand..........

Crouchie comes in for alot of stick but he's not doing too badly at the moment. Ideally, he's not a first team player for England or Liverpool but as circumstances have it, he's been thrown in there and done well for himself!

I remember his goal at Goodison this season, I honestly thought he was going to fluff it. I thought he had taken it too far past the goalkeeper.

What goal was that then? I appear to have a selective memory when it comes to football

Seriously, having seen Crouch play three times now at th World Cup, he's done nothing to change my opinion that he's a lamppost with legs. He doesn't seem to know what he's doing half the time (should I pass? shoot?) and seems totally out of his depth. Plus, when he plays, England go with the long ball far too much, which is ironic since Crouch is pretty poor in the air for a big guy. It's as if he just doesn't jump and expects the ball to land on his head......At least with Owen and Rooney it encourages the team to play through the midfield, which is arguably our strongest position on the field.

It looks like Owen will be out for the rest of the tournament with his knee injury.

Coincidentally was exactly the same thing i did to my knee in December and i couldnt run for at least 4 weeks.

If Owen did what I did, his knee dislocated sideways taking the ligiments with it and snapping half of them.

It Hurts a lot!!!!

glad to see joe Cole got man of the match espically after his fantastic goal definatly the best goal of the tournament by miles. Have to say this even though it pains me but Owen Hargreaves was the second best player for england

I always said he's a good player, and glad he did well yesterday. He's been too easily written off by the media in the past, for my liking. Its just cos people don't see him week in week out.

You're right about the long ball thing. Because of his height players just tend to lump it up to him, but he's actually better when the ball is played into his feet. That hasn't happened enough, especially when he was playing with Owen and that's probably why he has been poor this tournament.

With Rooney's introduction the ball will probably be played into feet more which will help him. He's good at holding the ball up and bringing others into play, but with Gerrard pinned back the onus is on Lampard to get into the box and he's not done enough in there to justify his selection as the attacking midfielder.

Crouch will always get alot of stick if there's no end product as he tends to take the blame when England or Liverpool are branded "boring" or "long ball teams". But he showed last night for Gerrard's goal that if people get forward and support him he will do some damage. There's no point lumping the ball to Crouch for him to flick on if there's no-one running beyond him.

I shudder in disbelief at the apparent consensus that Sven will now go with Crouch as the lone front man with five in the midfield. Surely we'll never score that way?

If it means the midfielders actually attack, that makes a tad more sense than anything else Sven's come up with.

The midfielders should attack in theory, but unfortunately the second half against Paraguay gives a more likely indication of what would happen

I don't think he will go with Crouch upfront alone with Rooney fit again. If Rooney is fit he has to play. Especially now that Owen is out.

I hate it when you're right. It was all I could think every time Owen flippin Hargreaves got the ball. And I HATE BEING WRONG!

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR......