Gerrard: England better than in 2010

Captain Steven Gerrard says England are ready to show Germany the scale of their improvement under manager Roy Hodgson when they meet at Wembley on Tuesday.

England face Germany for the first time since Joachim Low's side won 4-1 in Bloemfontein in the last 16 of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Gerrard said: “I'd say we are better”.

When you think about this it’s not actually that great because Gerrard is saying the team now is better than the team that lost 4-1 in the World Cup, hardly something to get behind is it, and this is the same team that was comfortably beaten by Chile four days ago, so the improvement isn’t that big.   

But I’d agree if you compare the starting XI for tonight’s game against the 11 that took that 4-1 pasting then yes I’d say we do have a better team now, for starters Heskey isn’t in the squad I think we can all agree that’s a major step forward.

But seriously if I were to pick an XI from the two I would have nine from the team playing tonight and five from the team of 2010, some players feature in both teams, and also the average age of the team tonight is much younger than in 2010, so that’s something to be optimistic about.

Although as we showed against Chile it may be three years later but we’re still just as vulnerable at the back and prone to conceding all too frequently.

As Germany are using this game as a means testing some new players, and, Smalling and Cleverley aside, we are at full strength, we need to put in a decent performance tonight to end 2013 on a positive note, because after that waste of 90 minutes of my life performance against Chile we need it.