Slightly clutching at straws

This has been an awful couple of weeks for Southgate and the England team but (and it's a fairly weak but) I don't think the results are completely reflective of performance.

I think xG is a useful stat for giving us a good understanding of who was the better side in a match, often better than the actual result does, for example if City get 4 xG against 0.5 xGA but lose 1-0 I don't think that City played badly, it was just one of those days when the gods were against them. The site footystats.org (note they give you limited page views) publish xG for internationals and, according to their stats we had the higher xG across all four games these last two weeks. According them the stats are:

Hungary 1.51 - England 1.54

Germany 1.54 - England 1.87

England 1.59 - Italy 1.08

England 1.32 - Hungary 1.00

Total

England 6.32 (scored 1) - Opponents 5.13 (Scored 6)

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to argue that England have actually been really good and everything's fine but perhaps these two weeks haven't been the disaster we thought they were and that, if we'd had our shooting boots on, we'd all be a lot more content than we actually are.