Quote Originally Posted by Eric the Half a Bee View Post
We barely deserved second. Serbia and Montenegro players had some falling out and a replacement XI won 1 point from 2 games with Azerbaijan and a trip to Finland. Once everyone had kissed and made up their first choice team beat us twice, quite comfortably from what I remember. The Italian win and performance was a distant memory over the last 4 qualification games. The Russia defeat was inevitable and expected of a side that had changed somewhat and Hughes should have gone after that defeat.
My memory isn't great bit I seem to recall that we went for a point against Montenegro away who had had a poor run of games and were about to ditch their manager.
Hughes should have gone for the jugular, then we would not have needed anything against Italy away, just had to win our home games.
We drew one of them and still could have qualified as Italy stuttered.

We got to the play off against Russia and played Earnie, who was scoring for fun at the time, on the wing

Safe to say Hughes did not cover himself in glory.