Pessimistic England fans are all making the same joke about Gareth Southgate's World Cup tactics
"England can now avoid Brazil by getting knocked out by Colombia"
After Thursday night's loss to Belgium in the final group game of the World Cup 2018, some England fans are fearing the worst, and making the same joke about England's prospects against Colombia.
After all the fuss about whether or not the team should play to lose to secure an easier run through to the final, lots of people on Twitter fear that the Three Lions will lose to Colombia on Tuesday anyway.
Despite assuring fans that he wanted to win the group, Gareth Southgate made eight changes to the side that won 6-1 against Panama last weekend, and suffered the consequences – losing 1-0 to a curling effort from Adnan Januzaj, who made his first start at the tournament in a significantly weakened Belgian 11 who will now play Japan in the next round, while England face Colombia.
The result means that Southgate's squad will avoid a quarter final tie with Brazil – if they make it that far, that is. Some fans aren't so hopeful...
"Imagine making 8 changes & purposefully getting 2nd place in the group and getting knocked out by Colombia in the first knockout stage," user @HODL_til_2140 wrote. "It's coming home to 'we are coming home'".
"England can now avoid Brazil by getting knocked out by Colombia," Adrian Lui tweeted.
Check out several slight variations on that theme below.
Gareth Southgate defended his decision to play a weakened side, however, saying that putting a full strength team on the pitch was "a risk we didn't need to take".
“We are through to the next phase," he said. "We had to do what we believed was the right thing. OK, we didn’t win the game, but there was a myriad of other things involved in the decision. In terms of the changes in the team, they had a game four days ago in extreme heat [in Nizhny Novgorod].We could have played them again on Thursday but, earlier in the day, you already saw Colombia lose a key player [James Rodríguez], Japan lose a key player and, had Senegal gone through, they would have lost a key player too."
Time will tell if the decision has paid off.
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