I like the idea as it would make friendlies a bit more interesting and give players penalty experience before big tourneys.

Deffo admin. I love penalty shootouts and like you said, the crowd wins because who wants a draw in a friendly? It's the best possible practice.

Good idea.

Most will hate it. I seem to be in the minority of England fans that loves penalty shootouts.

In principle this is a good idea. My only reservation would be that most of the players who would take it in a 'real' situation would probably have been subbed off in a friendly.

leave friendlies as they are i think

That's a good point, Diafol.

How would it affect FIFA ranking? Does it still go down as a draw?

I think it's a quality idea, there shouldn't be a friendly draw.

Have at it.

We should just practice more really. An hour extra at each training session at international get-togethers isn't too difficult is it? Better that than going back to the boredom of the team hotel.

And added to this the way we practice penalties should change. Whenever I practiced in a team, the goalie was always guessing which way to dive. So many of the penalties were 'wasted', because even though the ball went in the goal, it wasn't particularly well placed, but the goalie dived the wrong way. There was no real benefit to the penalty practice.

What should happen is that the penalty takers practice putting it in a specific spot over and over - but with the goalie knowing exactly where the ball is going, the penalty taker will have to be extremely acurate. This is a better way of practicing penalties. But no-one ever seems to do this.

Generally I find international friendlies pretty boring. A solution in my mind (although it will never happen) is to have all the friendly games count for ranking purposes and to discount the result of the qualifiers (as the reward there is, well, qualification). This may lead to skewed rankings for a bit but it could in the long run lead to countries taking the friendlies more seriously as if they don't they could potentially be put in more difficult groups. Which wouldn't be a bad thing as it would make them more entertaining. This would soon sort itself out IMO as the friendlies would take on more importance and would lead to higher quality matches.

To be fair the last few England friendlies have been entertaining (bar the Ireland game).

There was the Brazil 2-1 and the Brazil 2-2, the Scotland 3-2 and the Sweden 4-2.

To be fair, most of the qualifying games bar the last two have been boring.

I don't think it's friendlies that are the biggest problem in terms of entertainment, it's England.

If it's for internationals then lets have penalty shoot-outs and do away with the matches altogether.

And they can put all the fixtures on one day in the year, like Christmas Eve or some other day when I am busy with real-life stuff.

Darren.

I think the friendlies with Germany and Chile could be entertaining. Neither team can defend.

To be honest I am fed up with seeing players pull out of friendlies. It's not so bad as a fan of one of the bigger nations but when you have ten pull out of Wales games it makes you think what the point is. Maybe if it meant a little more we (Wales) would do a little better when the real games come about. Anyway that's a diferent subject and won't bore you with it!!

I might actually go to the Germany game. Haven't been to an England game since Nigeria in 1994

Those tickets will be selling like hotcakes.

Yes, great idea. Implement it in the next friendly and give the Germans some much needed practice and a nice psychological boost.

There's always a way to get tickets to England matches at Wembley. Should be a fun game and the bigger names might drop out with 'injuries' so we might see the younger guys.

True but we haven't played them at Wembley for 6 years so they should go quick and I think we'll take this very seriously.

Germany less so. It's a bit of a one way rivalry.

I dunno, I lived in Munich for 6 months and their newspaper had more English football stuff than German most days.

The locals (and maybe this is only Munich) were always going on about England.

I see. Well I know we consider them our biggest rivals whereas they're more concerned about the Netherlands than us.

England have rivalries with everyone!

They still hate Australia after we destroyed your first team 3-1 back in 2003.

It's because we're miserable barstewards. You'd think we were Scottish or something.

We don't have a football rivalry with you because you're crap.

Rugby and cricket (oh wait...) on the other hand.

You needed Broad to cheat and rain to beat us this summer. Next month we shall gain revenge!