England will deliver, says Roy Hodgson

Roy Hodgson believes his England side “will deliver” World Cup qualification.

They face Montenegro on Friday knowing that a win, coupled with victory over Poland on Tuesday, would guarantee their place in Brazil next year.

“We realise England expects,” Hodgson said. “They expect us to play well in these two games and to win them. I believe the players will deliver.”

I have a slightly different opinion that that of Hodgson I want us to qualify but based on previous performances I simply don’t share his confidence, in this group we’ve comfortably scored the most goals and conceded the least and yet qualifying still hangs in the balance.

The only teams in our group we’ve beaten are the whipping boys Moldova and San Marino, all our games against the other teams fighting for qualification have all been draws and all featured pretty lacklustre performances.

If you look at our results in the group they go win-draw-win-draw-win-draw-win-draw and if we repeat that sequence in the next two games then we’ll be relying on other results.

But there is a way we can take four points and from our last two games and still qualify, if we beat Montenegro tonight and Ukraine fail to beat Poland then we’ll only need a point from our last game, and judging by the way things have gone I can see us doing that and just scraping through.

As we currently sit 17^th in the FIFA rankings, we were 4^th when Hodgson took over, our group at the World Cup will feature a top eight team so either a Spain, Argentina, Germany, Italy, teams of that ilk meaning we’ll finish second, just, get knocked out in the last 16 again and come home from another tournament depressed and disappointed.

I don’t care how optimistic you are, you know as well as I do that this is the England football team we’re talking about its going to happen.