Germany have emerged as a formidable team during this world cup. Despite this, England could have easily pushed them and maybe even won. However, thanks to Capello’s frankly ridiculous tactics, this never looked like happening.
4-4-2 is dying. 8 or 9 years ago it was the swiss army knife of formations. Balanced, adaptable and flexible, most club sides utilized it in some way shape or form. As football has progressed however, 4-4-2 has become easily exploited and pushed into lower leagues in the same way 5-3-2 was in the early nineties.
Why then, does Capello continue to use it? The poor performance against the USA should have got the alarm bells ringing and when the entire team failed to wake up against Algeria there were rumours that even the players weren’t comfortable with what they had been asked to do. John Terry’s press conference showed as much to the media and public.
A slight improvement against Slovenia seemed to put the public’s fears to rest but it only served to paper over the cracks. When the USA scored their late winner against Algeria and it became apparent we’d face Germany in the last 16, I began to worry that a thrashing would be dealt out and the England team would undoubtedly be on the receiving end.
As many people pointed out, man for man we could definitely hold our own against a young German side. On the day, many of the players turned out embarrassingly poor performances but the truth of the matter is that there is only one man to blame and it isn’t the linesman or the referee.
4-4-2 vs 4-2-3-1
Germany lined up the same way they have throughout the tournament in a 4-2-3-1 shape that allows Mesut Ozil space to roam freely behind the a lone striker. Ozil is a very dangerous, positionally aware player that creates havoc in defenses with his intelligent running and excellent distribution. Capello must have known about how dangerous he was after his match winning performances against Australia and Ghana. Australia lined up with a 4-4-2 and were completely dominated by the Germans. Ghana allowed Ozil space once throughout the whole of their game and he thanked them by driving home an excellent strike.
For Germany's third, Ozil simply runs into space during a quick counter. The defender is forced to come inside to pick him up, leaving Mueller completely unmarked
Capello didn’t change his tactics or side from the Slovenia game and as a result, Ozil was given space he could only have dreamed of before the game started. He was involved in all but one of his sides three goals either with an assist or intelligent play.
Again, Ozil finds himself in acres of space and simply skips past Gareth Barry to create the fourth goal.
When playing 4-4-2 against a formation which has a player “in the hole” like 4-2-3-1, it allows the player to drop between the lines of defense and midfield and creates real problems. Does a defender move out of position to pick him up? If he does, he risks allowing one of the wide players to drift inside and exploit the gap, which Podolski would have been more than happy to do. So, surely a midfielder drops deep to counteract the problem? The problem there is that this creates a 2 vs 1 situation in midfield. Schweinsteiger or Khedira would have been left with space as a direct result and could easily become as dangerous as Ozil was with time on the ball.
As it turned out, neither of these things happened regularly and Ozil popped up all over the pitch exploiting space and creating chances. At one stage he’d simply drifted out into a wide position when Ashley Cole had got forward. Nobody made any attempt to pick him up. Lampard briefly noticed the problem in the first half and started dropping slightly deeper to try mark him, however once the second went in he understandbly began to push forward in an attempt to get back into the game.
Klose was also excellent in his lone striker role, making intelligent runs and consistently dragging Terry and Upson out of position. Muller and Podolski took full advantage and between them scored three of the four goals.
For the second, Klose (yellow) has drifted wide allowing Terry to come forward in an attempt to win the ball from Ozil (blue). The result is a stretched defense meaning Mueller has acres of space to run into. Ashley Cole comes across in an attempt to close the gap but leaves Podolski (red) in acres of space when the ball eventually arrives.
A Change in Shape?
Once 3 down, Capello displayed what can only be described as an infuriating disregard for tactics. He changed precisely nothing. He brought on Emile Heskey, a striker with a worse international goalscoring record than former Paraguay goalkeeper Jose Chilavert and Joe Cole, a player who has been struggling for form of late.
The bringing on of Cole was especially frustrating. Milner can’t be considered anything like a winger this season but he provided real width on the right. Cole’s tendency to drift inside looking for space meant that England had players on both wings who were failing to provide the necessary width to break the German defense down. England never looked like scoring in the second half and Capello failed to do anything about it.
Bob Bradley (USA Manager) saw his team struggling against Ghana and made the bold move of bringing off a player after just 35 minutes in an attempt to get back into the game. Changing the shape meant the USA became the better side and pushed Ghana all the way. There was no such bravery with Capello. A limp, lifeless performance from both players and manager alike meant an early tournament exit at the hands of an excellent side.
Intelligent Tactics
If 4-4-2 wasn’t right for this game, what was?
To start with, any formation with 3 in midfield would have fared better. In a 3 v 3 midfield battle England arguably have better players and could have retained the ball better and created space for themselves. Allowing Lampard the license to get forward gives England a real goal threat from midfield and with Barry and Milner, one of them can pick up Ozil while the other looks to take Schweinstegier out of the game.
Gerrard is unfortunately pushed out to the left again, simply because his positional indiscipline means putting him in the midfield would mean Lampard has to pick up his defensive duties, something we have seen time and time again when attempting to play the two together.
With a choice of either Lennon, Joe Cole or Wright-Phillips on the right providing width, the prospects begin to improve, especially considering this puts Rooney into a lone striking role that has seen him score so prolifically for his club this season.
Essentially, imitating the German formation could have resulted in a much more even game. Unfortunately, Capello seems to insist on sticking with an antiquated formation which has been found out in recent times (see Germany vs Australia for a perfect example) and if he continues to allow his stubborness to get in the way of sense, we shouldn’t expect any world beating performances from England in the forseeable future.
Now I’m not going to pretend I like Apple – I’m not particularly a fan. Not because of their products – mainly because of their ethos and the way they go about their business.
Having said that, I watched the iPhone 4 announcement and couldn’t help but feel that Jobs & Co missed a trick.
Android has been slowly but surely catching up to the 3GS with the release of its 2.1 version along with hardware such as the Droid, Desire, Legend and Nexus One – excellent phones and real competitors.
As is the way with such a competetive market, Apple fought back with the release of the fourth iteration of its iPhone, introducing new hardware and revamped OS which had already been demoed earlier in the year.
The stand out features are;
- A front facing camera with wifi only video chat
- An updated 5 megapixel camera with flash and 720p HD video recording
- Thinner, more “square” design
- Improved display with better pixel density
- Gyrometer replaces accelerometer allowing pan, rotate and yaw
This is supplemented by a few changes to the operating system with its update to version 4.0 (note: they changed the name to iOS) which introduces features such as pseudo multi-tasking, better customization and better app management amongst a wealth of other tweaks and updates to better enhance the user experience.
Now, don’t get me wrong – these are all excellent and welcome improvements. Jobs did his usual business of over-selling everything to make it sound revolutionary and “magical” and most people came away more than happy with the changes.
After having a few days to digest this, I can’t help but think they could have made it so much more.
Firstly, the screen. Yes, an improvement in resolution is fantastic – but why hasn’t the size changed? Obviously, I had no input into the engineering of the phone but I can’t help but look at it and feel that there is a lot of real estate being wasted. They made it thinner, they made it lighter – why not make it bigger? I’m almost positive they could have increased the height and allowed more room. Think of the improvement when browsing web pages etc.
Secondly FaceTime. Why, oh why have they chosen to use a proprietary format? No doubt they will cite reason such as “our algorithm” and “performance” but there are several high quality video chat protocols already being used. If Apple has made FaceTime utilize Jabber/XMPP the whole tech world would have “ooooh’d” together in unison. Can you imagine the scramble to catch up if you were able to video chat with your friends using GMail? Facebook uses Jabber, they would be jumping on the bandwagon, Android would follow suit and then, before you know it the whole world is using video chat. Apple could stand up proud and say they started a movement, instead they’re locking you in to iPhone to iPhone chat. Such a shame.
Third, the notifications system. I find it hard to believe that even the hardest core of the Apple fanboy can believe that push notifications aren’t completely unintuitive. They popup seemingly at will, with no way to minimize or background them without dismissing them entirely. An overhaul of the notifications system would have been an extremely welcome addition to a part of the UI that is flagging behind the rest of the smartphone market. Android has its system tray which is fantastically intuitive and Maemo/Symbian has a notification area. You can be notified of events without having to acknowledge them straight away. Apple could have overhauled the UI (including the home screen, which I’ll get to in a minute) and allowed notifications that aren’t intrusive.
Finally, the home screen. I’m not sure what the powers that be have against any home screen customization on the iPhone – but its beginning to suck. You look at Windows Phone 7 and see an extremely intuitive live home screen that aggregates information from a number of source. The home screen is, with all intensive purposes – alive. Then, with Android, Symbian and Maemo (soon to be MeeGo) you see a system that become infinitely customizable using widgets, live home screens and other useful techniques. People like this – it makes them feel like their phone is uniquely theirs. Apple’s response to this is to allow you to change a background but it simply isn’t enough.
Apple has definitely raised the games again but I genuinely feel they haven’t introduced anything that will put them years ahead. Judging by their relatively slow turn around (a new phone roughly every 1.5 years) they will be hard pressed to compete with the offerings from of a combined HTC and Android along with Nokia and Maemo.
Either way, its going to be an interesting year in smartphone land.
Flash video has been dominant for many years on the web and most are happy with it. Apple, however, are not and they are pushing hard for a new standard to be adopted which uses the HTML5 video tag. They are pushing it so hard in fact that they have chosen not to support Flash video on their “magical” iPad, iPhone and iPod touch devices.
This is all well and good, however, there are problems with HTML5 that haven’t yet been addressed. To use HTML5 you need to encode your video with a codec. The de-facto standard, up-to this point, has been H.264. Google adopted it (in Google Chrome and with Youtube), Apple adopted it (with Safari on their Macs, and iTouch devices) and Microsoft even suggested they would support it in their upcoming Internet Explorer 9. Everyone is happy right?
Wrong. The two other big players in the web browsing scene, Mozilla and Opera, point blank refused to support H.264 because it costs money to implement. To massive companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google – shelling out to put videos on the web is within their interests (especially considering that the money gets indirectly paid to a company that the three above have shares in, but thats a different story) but to smaller companies (like Opera) and non-profit organisations (like Mozilla) they simply can’t afford to adopt a proprietary standard. Add that to the fact that Mozilla’s open source ideals don’t really allow them to include proprietary technologies and it becomes difficult to even think about getting involved.
So, the problems arose and it seemed like a stand-off had emerged. H.264 would never be adopted because in order for it to be standardized, everyone had to agree. Apple pressed on regardless by implementing many sites with the codec, Google started an experimental rollout of H.264 videos on Youtube and Mozilla and Opera continued to moan about it.
Then, something curious happened.
Google seemed to lose its patience and it bought a whole company.
On2 was a company that specifically develops video codecs. Google bought it, took their best codec (then known as VP8) and simply open-sourced it, making it free to implement and freely distributable. It cost them betwen $100million and $130million. They have since called it WebM.
Now, you’d think this would settle the argument, wouldn’t you? Mozilla and Opera rejoiced, Microsoft announced they will support the codec (sort of) and Google have begun to integrate support for it into Google Chrome. Everyone is happy right?
Well, again, wrong. Apple aren’t happy with these developments and have stated they have no intention of supporting WebM.
Again, regardless, Google have started a rollout of WebM on Youtube. If you’re an early adopter and are using a development version of Google Chrome (which you can get from here if you’re impatient) you can try out WebM now. Simply do a Youtube search and add &webm=1 to the end of the search string.
You’ll also need to join the Youtube HTML5 beta first by visiting this link.
Thats where we are now. Another stalemate, another standoff. Can’t we all just get along?
Finally, the one feature everybody wanted from Dropbox is here. Selective sync!
If you don’t know what Dropbox is, its a killer cloud syncing application that works across all platforms. The only problem upto now was that EVERTHING in your dropbox was synced, you couldn’t be selective on what downloaded and uploaded.
The latest experimental release has now changed all that. To give it a try, head here
Installation on Windows and Mac should be fairly straightforward, however on Linux, the easiest way is as follows;
dropbox stop && cd ~
wget http://dl-web.dropbox.com/u/17/dropbox-lnx.x86-0.8.64.tar.gz
tar -xvf dropbox-lnx.x86-0.8.64.tar.gz
dropbox start
Copy and past the above in your terminal and you’re all set.
If you’re using a 64-bit version, replace the center two commands with this
wget http://dl-web.dropbox.com/u/17/dropbox-lnx.x86_64-0.8.64.tar.gz
tar -xvf dropbox-lnx.x86_64-0.8.64.tar.gz
Whats new?
If you’ve been using the experimental build for a while, some of this may be familiar. However, here are the new features I stumbled across while checking out the updated build;
Pause and Resume
Previously you had to stop Dropbox to pause syncing. Now, simply hit Pause. The client is still active but the syncing stops!
Bandwidth Control
If you’ve got some large files in your dropbox, you might appreciate the ability to control the speed with which dropbox downloads and uploads at;
Selective Sync
Finally, the one you’ve all been waiting for. Selective sync! Fairly self explanatory..
MeeGo is the lovechild of Maemo and Moblin – open source Linux projects from Nokia and Intel respectively. Its focus is going to be be the netbook and smartphone markets (as well as some consideration for set top boxes and other media outlets).
Today, MeeGo 1.0 was released for netbooks. I decided to boot it from a USB drive and give it the once over.
My first impression on testing was that it booted fast. Really fast. I was testing on an Acer Aspire 2930 laptop which admittedly is no slouch, however the speed was extremely noticeable and refreshing even for an Ubuntu user.
The UI that greeted me instantly reminded me of Moblin with a visual overhaul. I was greeted with a summary page called “MyZones” which looked like this
The other available tabs are Zones, Applications, Status, People, Internet, Media and Devices, which pretty much covers all the tasks you’d ever want to undertake.
Firstly, there was zones. According to the zones page any applications I’m using will show up in zones. I wasn’t quite sure how this worked and after opening various applications I gave up trying to understand it.
Next Applications;
The installed applications include pretty much everything you’d ever need on first boot. A few games, web browser (in this case Google Chrome), settings manager and mail clients are all here and they are all applications you’ll probably be familiar with if you’ve ever used a Desktop Linux OS.
For example, the default mail client is evolution, the default media player is banshee. The software update uses packagekit. All the apps have been skinned with Meego’s UI giving a nice look and feel across the board.
Status allows you to add web accounts to MeeGo which will then propagate in the Myzones tab as well as in this status tab. Only Twitter and Last.fm are supported however. I’m hoping that Facebook and Myspace are on the way, otherwise this section becomes pretty much redundant.
People is basically Empathy with the MeeGo skin. I had a few issues with connectivity (especially with Emapthy’s built in Facebook chat function) that were quite frustrating – these things are to be expected with early releases though.
The most impressive aspect is the Chrome web browser. Most people are aware of Chrome, but with the MeeGo skin makes it looks fantastic. Flash is included out of the box and works extremely well with very little lag. A minimise button would have been nice though.
The media tab uses the excellent Banshee media player and is extremely well built. A custom banshee build has been put together and it realls shows here, video and music playing flawlessly.
Finally, the devices tab. Here you’ll find some quick info about your system (battery percentage, sound status etc) and the main folders. Clicking on them opens up Nautilus.
The main tabs are what you’ll use most often but there are some hidden goodies too. My personal favourite is the sync application and it does exactly what you’d expect it to – it syncs the OS with numerous available services.
Impressions
As silly as it sounds, my first impression of MeeGo is that it could make a real difference in the OS market. Its a well though out, attractive OS with all the features you might expect to see from a young project. It’ll be extremely interesting to see where they take it from here.
The Best Bits;
- Hardware detection was faultless, even on my “unsupported” laptop. Headphone detection worked, webcam, volume wheel – even suspend/resume worked!! I’m aware that this is more down to the underlying technologies (X.org etc) but its still fantastic to see
- BTRFS support means the future is bright in filesystem land.
- The UI is beautiful and the speed of the whole experience a joy to behold. Considering this is the first release, its extremely encouraging.
- Using apps like Banshee, Empathy, and Evolution that are tried and tested breeds familiarity. Interesting to know how the smartphone apps will look though?
A few gripes;
- No shutdown button? Pressing the power button fires up a shutdown dialogue, but surely a shutdown/logout button should be in any early release?
- After all the fanfare about Nokia acquiring QT, why are all the applications GTK based? Seems strange to me.
- Facebook integration. Facebook, despite all its faults, is the biggest social network. It needs to be supported in people.
- Task switching – a simple Alt-tab function would be good enough. Having to close the application you have open just to start something else is extremely counter productive.
A small nitpick that most people will overlook;
- The Chrome icon sticks out like an eyesore compared to the other icons.
Obviously we have the smartphone release to look forward to as well but from a netbook’s point of view, the future seems bright for MeeGo.