If Roy Hodgson gauged public opinion through Twitter to pick his England team who would make the starting XI?
Roy Hodgson must have a lot on his mind at the moment. The England manager has a Euro 2012 squad of 23 players all champing at the bit to get on the field but only 11 can make the starting line-up.
Should he change a winning line-up and let Wayne Rooney come back into the side? Should he re-instate young Oxlade-Chamberlain? How long can he ignore Jack Butland’s stupendous form in training and keep faith with Joe Hart? The dilemmas are endless.
Perhaps Roy should just let public opinion – rather than complicated tactical considerations – dictate his choice. Letting the public choose the side might have saved a lot of bother in the past. After all, would a public vote have allowed Geoff Thomas to wear the England shirt or led to the decision to let Gareth Southgate appear in midfield against the Germans?
If Roy was to gauge public opinion then he could do worse than examine which squad players get the most favourable mentions on Twitter. Manually trawling through all the tweets to find this information out would be a massive task but luckily a company called Brandwatch have a social media monitoring tool which can do this quickly and easily.
Just click here to see how Brandwatch have pulled in every single tweet about the England squad since the beginning of May. They’ve organised the data too, analysing the language behind the tweets to estimate the sentiment behind them; a neat way of establishing the popularity of individual players.
Analysing the stats it is clear that three players are attracting far more tweets than their colleagues are. Wayne Rooney is top of the pile with 148,000 tweets mentioning his name since May. Andy Carroll has 126,000 tweets and John Terry has 124,000 tweets.
You can see a cool infographic detailing how the England team would look if it was picked on number of mentions here. The rest of this article will concentrate on how the England team would look if it was selected according to the sentiment behind the tweets (whether Brandwatch classified them as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ mentions.
Using this criteria would lead to Roy Hodgson making some surprising changes to his starting XI.
Joe Hart attracted a positive rating of 14 per cent which means that he would hang on the number one jersey and Joleon Lescott (10 per cent), Glen Johnson (7 per cent) and Ashley Cole (9 per cent) would also retain their places. However, Phil Jones’s rating of 12 per cent would see him getting the nod over John Terry (six per cent).
Terry would be joined on the bench by Scott Parker, whose eight per cent rating is not enough to get into a midfield made up of Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain (12 per cent), Steven Gerrard (17 per cent), Theo Walcott (13 per cent) and, most surprisingly, Jordan Henderson (11 per cent).
There would also be no place in the side for Ashley Young (6 per cent) although his Manchester United colleague Danny Welbeck would be an automatic choice (15 per cent).
But who would partner Welbeck up front? Roy Hodgson won’t get any help from Twitter regarding the question of whether to deploy Wayne Rooney or Andy Carroll – both scored a ten per cent positivity mention. Perhaps, Roy could play one in the first half and one in the second.
Here is the full Twitter England line-up. If this is what Roy goes for then you will know where he got the inspiration from!
Hart, Johnson, Cole, Lescott, Jones, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Henderson, Gerrard, Walcott, Welbeck, Carroll/Rooney
