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Harry's hot takes: What tactics can the England football team learn from mobile gaming?

Is football coming home?

Harry's hot takes: What tactics can the England football team learn from mobile gaming?
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| Candy Crush Saga

Football, eh? It's a funny old game. And the best thing about that statement is that it's almost certainly correct whether you're reading this before or after England's glorious triumph against the mighty Sweden / England's embarrassing capitulation against the minnows of Sweden (delete as applicable).

But what could the purveyors of the beautiful game learn from the mobile gaming industry that might give them the edge in their game of ultimate ball-kicking? Nothing? Probably not, but someone has to write this nonsense, so I may as well say they can learn loads.

This week's hot take, then is all about the strategies and skills the England football team can learn from mobile games as they attempt to banish the far-from catchy 52 years of hurt in the boiling cauldron of advertising hoardings and adverts for drone-flown beers in central Russia.

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Evade, then attack - Infinity Blade

This is a tactic that the Belgians have already put to good use in their last three games. Let your opponent attack, then when they think they're at their strongest, run up the field and boot the ball into the goal. It sounds pretty simple when you write it down, I could probably be a football manager.

Hog Rider attack - Clash Royale

This one comes from left-field, but if there was a way that the England team could smuggle a hog onto the pitch and then ride it towards their opponent's goal, I reckon they'd be in with a good chance of winning. Giant pigs are pretty terrifying, even if you can trace your lineage to Viking raiders.

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Chicken dinner - PUBG

If, come the end of the second half, only Harry Kane remains alive, cowering in the centre circle wearing just a pair of pants and holding a stick, then Southgate will have implemented the chicken dinner plan. It does rely on the Swedish not getting the randomly allocated weapons first, but I don't think they're as spritely as the likes of Kyle Walker so I reckon it'll be fine.

Super match - Candy Crush Saga

Correct me if I'm wrong, but football players wear the same colour shirts so they know who to pass to, right? Well, if five of them stood in a row in the penalty box, they'd create a super match. This would give them some sort of bomb that could, theoretically, be used to clear an awful lot of the board. Everyone would disappear though, so probably best to get the opposition into that position rather than the other way round.

Dont' do anything until someone pays or two hours have passed - Most games

It's often the weight of expectation that crushes the England team in major tournaments, so if they all just stood still until enough people had paid to speed up their wait-timers, it's likely that the public would be so disgusted they wouldn't care if Sterling et al won or not. Thus expectations would be gotten rid of, and football would come home. Foolproof.

Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.