You might have missed David Pleat’s praise of our disciplined defence in yesterday’s Guardian.

Some of the commenters on the piece reckon Pleat was inviting ridicule by lauding our defence after we conceded a late goal to Liverpool, but I’d praise him for writing the story anyway. As a sports hack, it’s all too easy to write the obvious article. Pleat’s tapped intosome of the reasons why we’re much harder to beat under Roy Hodgson, although I’m sure we could have done without our tactics being dissected in a national newspaper.