World Cup 2014

will brazil be able to rise to the challenge? they'll also be without thiago silva against germany. i can almost see this really rallying the team and fans, now they're suddenly the underdogs in their home country.

and of course the other highlight from yesterday:

crackerjack said:

Now it gets tough. Based on performances to date, the semis should be
Colombia v France
Holland v Belgium

But can Colombia do it against a 'big team' (though clearly not a great one) or Belgium score enough to see off Messi?

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Sadly not with regards to Colombia - I feared that might be the case. The traditional top teams again seem to have too much nous when it really matters - bit of a pity, as it's remarkable how few teams have still reached a world cup final. I hope Costa Rica can buck the trend tonight, but the odds don't look good and how will they deal with Robben?

Okay, who is going to win it all now?

paolo said:

I predict that Brazil will win and England will go out in the group stage

Will do better than expected - Bosnia

Will not do as well as expected - Germany

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Well, I got one right

paolo said:

Well, I got one right

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Better than me.

What the fuck happened tonight? That's the biggest choke in sporting history, surely? Fair enough, Germany are better than Brazil, and without Neymar and Thiago Silva especially so, but after the second goal went in, that was disgraceful stuff.

it was like brazil was playing with nine men. wearing cement shoes.

Anyone want to bet against Germany winning it now?

paolo said:

Anyone want to bet against Germany winning it now?

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Ahem, why not? That's the same team that had a tough time beating France and Algeria.

And they are not gonna play a second "game of their lives" in one week.

Yeah, Germany aren't certainties at all - I remember Man Utd beating Roma 7-1 or something in the Champions League but they went out in the next round. It's how you play on the day.
Germany murdered Brazil and Portugal but struggled against most of the others - I reckon Brazil played into their hands by trying to take the game to them. I doubt anyone remembers it now but Brazil did come out of the blocks quickly and made most of the running for the first five minutes or so but as a result of that there was so much space behind them when the Germans did break (and the organisation of the defence was laughable of course) that it was a lot easier for them than against teams who set up to stop them scoring. It seems Brazil believed their own myth or wanted to live up to it or something and so they simply couldn't play like the away team in their own back yard. Or possibly they recognised that without Silva they simply wouldn't have had the discipline to play that kind of game and they would have gone out meekly and negatively.
Fred and Hulk aren't as good as, say, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho - not their fault and you have to feel sorry for them because a whole country hates them for that simple fact.

I think most of the hate is directed at fred and scolari.

Well, whatever, I feel sorry for Fred in that every time he pulls on the shirt he is expected to perform at a level that he has no chance of getting anywhere near. Even the UK commentators have been on his case in a way that seems to border on the personal. Brazil don't have any great strikers at the moment, Fred is one of the best of a bad lot, it seems to me that it would be better to ask why Brazil aren't producing world class strikers any more instead of blaming the best they have got for not being better.

Anyone else read that article about youth football in Belgium the other day in one of the weekend papers (I forget which one)? The gist of the article was that they had a kinda major rethink after being knocked out of the world cup by England in 1990.
There were a number of initiatives put in place, the one that struck me the most was that they banned kids up to a certain age from playing full-sided games; there was some resistance from clubs and the like but when they showed them all the statistics they had gathered and clubs realised that if they put their hopefulls in an eleven-a-side game then they only touched the ball an average of five times, it wasn't hard to persuade them that kids improve much more if they concentrate on 3-a-side and 5-a-side. Another idea was to insist that when they did start playing 11-a-side they always played 4-3-3 so everyone in the country was familiar with that. Not so sure of the wisdom of that one but it's interesting.
In a way though - what impressed me even more than the ideas that they were putting in place was the fact that they could put them in place. In England there isn't really any mechanism by which someone could introduce ideas like that across the board. I'm sure it's easier in a smaller country but my guess is one thing that can make such sweeping changes possible is a massive fucking spannering after which every single person in the country who has any slight interest in football has to admit that there is something seriously wrong with the whole chain of events which occurs between when a kid starts kicking a ball around in his back garden and when he ends up playing for his country.
So what I'm saying in a roundabout way is that this might be the moment when Brazil can actually stop resting on its laurels and start making more Ronaldos and fewer Freds. It's a hugely populous country and everyone there loves football - sheer statistics suggest that if there was no decent youth development in any country then you would expect them to be amongst the best teams, if they're not then it seems likely that others must be doing better cos they've got better development systems in place.

Yeah, saw that. They also stopped publishing league tables. Sounds like they know what they're doing.

droid said:

Yeah, saw that. They also stopped publishing league tables. Sounds like they know what they're doing.

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Excellent.

Well it's soon over and I will miss it.
Not Brazil - but James of Colombia, Costa Rica's fantastic defence (think what they could have done with a proper striker?), Neuer's sweeping, the gone-missing long-range free kicks (the Brazuca ball's fault? or maybe it was ->), the stupid boots and dances, goal line tech (can't we simply have video - like in ice hockey and rugby and so on? oh no), the penalty shootouts, Alan Hansen's swansong, the disappointing performances of Japan and South Korea (what has happened?), Blatter's absence (was there really a secret VIP-tribune at some games?). England - more disappointment, if nothing else we could have hoped for an exciting round-of-16 crunch match, but it was not be.


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The Germans also rebooted their football (think half of the first 11 played together at under-21 levels? - contrast with Stuart Pearce's rant about not being able to select 17 U21 players for U21 champs, the clubs would not let them).

It might be easy to go for the Klinsmann as laid-back surfer dude, I think he is a lot smarter than that. In England the Premiership+Sky/BT+massive egos of players&managers (well money in short) > FA so no English revolution can be expected. It's not the English way. But bless Greg Dyke for trying to and speaking some sense on the whole FIFA/Blatter mire.

This was written a month ago, before a ball was kicked -
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/06/last-world-cup-after-brazil-2014-tournament-finished

best national team ever?

http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/germany-may-be-the-best-national-soccer-team-ever/

A bunch of people with a strong grudge against 538/Silver wrote some long article about his Brazil Germany prediction, like they had been waiting for him to be wrong about a soccer game prediction for six years or longer or something.