World Cup 2010 Thread

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spain got in some LUCKY situations - netherlands shoulda had those 2 goals



i cant believe i watched this soccer shit - thank gawd its over!


PuffinPuffinPuffin
Neptune Wrote:PS that stamp in the chest reminded me of Cantona. What the fuck wasn't that a red card?

I didn't think that tackle or any of the tackles Hansen was going on about were red cards. They were aggressive but they weren't all that dangerous. That one was foot up and caught him in the chest. The other ones went through players, but they weren't shin-high or knee-high legbreakers. Yellow cards yes, red cards no. At least not for an English ref used to the Premiership. Some namby pamby continental ref maybe :P
Rest of summer is going to be rubbish now..

what the hell am I going to do.
Statto Wrote:
Neptune Wrote:PS that stamp in the chest reminded me of Cantona. What the fuck wasn't that a red card?

I didn't think that tackle or any of the tackles Hansen was going on about were red cards. They were aggressive but they weren't all that dangerous. That one was foot up and caught him in the chest.

Youre right, it wasn't a red card, it was assault.

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ya big jessie :P
there was no fucking way he was going for the ball! he would've missed it by a mile if alonso wasnt there!
www.astrophonica.co.uk           
alonso shouldn't have been there. blatent foul on de jong's foot
Icon_sad

Crazy game. We were lucky all the tournament and just like the other matches, we were also playing rubbish in the first half. I had a lot of confidence in the second because we started to play football. In all the other matches we scored 2 or 3 because of some luck or skills. This time we failed so we didn't deserve it.

Further i think the referee was absolutely rubbish. With some yellow cards we didn't even touch the Spanish players and the second yellow for Heitinga was wrong as well. I wonder if Iniesta still scored if Heitinga was there.

If you like cards, play poker.

I have total respect for Spain. I love it to see their skills, especially how Iniesta touches the ball. amazing
Interesting you say that Fre4knc because the rest of the world is shocked at the lack of football and the excess of violence on behalf of your team.

Yes the Ref was horrible, there were plenty of yellow cards not given from minute 1. If you say that the players didn't even contact then watch a replay, thats what video is for.

As far as your team goes, I really thought they would have been a tougher team for us then they were. I understand using violence as a tactic to throw the other team off their play but then you must use this tactic to score on that team. Somehow I think they forgot that part.

interesting that the only people in the world defending the dutch are the dutch themselves. Just take a look at all of the media internationally! Everyone agress that your team came out to kick ass! not to win a game!

Sorry if I get defensive but If we are proud of anything, its the fairplay on our behalf and I can't accept violence to win over fairplay.
egres Wrote:Yes the Ref was horrible, there were plenty of yellow cards not given from minute 1. If you say that the players didn't even contact then watch a replay, thats what video is for.

refs don't have replays

but anyway aggression is part of the game for an English ref
try watching clips of Leeds United in the the 1970s

Grin
Haha, i wonder what happened with the international media if that de Jong foul didn't happen. Of course it is wrong to place your shoe in someone's chest but i'm sure that wasn't meant. If you jump in the air to kick the ball and you see someone is running into you it is quite hard to stop innit? You can see that he was shocked as well and that he didn't kick through. Of course it's too wild, but it's blown up imo.

Football is a contact sport.
Sorry mate, I watch a LOT of football at all levels. I went into the game supporting Holland and found myself shouting 'yes' when Spain scored (although mainly as it meant no penalties). Holland were absolutely appalling, I haven't seen play like that since Norman feckin Whiteside.

FWIW I don't buy the line that Holland were the only team at it either. Yes, Spain did want to play football more than the Dutch, but they still allowed themselves to be dragged down and committed some awful fouls themselves.

Howard Webb made a few mistakes, especially towards the end, but it was a horrible game for any referee. He did his best to keep the players on the pitch in the face of some of the worst football I have ever seen. Any referee would come out looking like an arsehole from that game, no matter what they did. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Roll on proper football... 30 days or so to go Smile
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Don Cherry Wrote:Every human is blessed in her or his life with one love (passion), no matter how long it may last. This Absolute love will last in one's heart and soul forever.
I agree that spain wanted to play more football than us. I just say, all the foul bashing is blown up. Wink
Fre4knc Wrote:I just say, all the foul bashing is blown up. Wink

Xyxthumbs

and all the ref bashing Wink
I'm really proud of Holland for reaching the finals Grin I think second place is awesome for our small country! Yes, maybe the final wasn't Hollands prettiest game, but I wonder what any other country would have done if they were in our place.... but none of them reached the finals so we'll never know Wink

Anyway I'm a girl, what do I know about soccer :P
Statto Wrote:
Fre4knc Wrote:I just say, all the foul bashing is blown up. Wink

Xyxthumbs

and all the ref bashing Wink

Xyxthumbs and Xyxthumbs (and yes I know I am incriminating myself somewhat)
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Don Cherry Wrote:Every human is blessed in her or his life with one love (passion), no matter how long it may last. This Absolute love will last in one's heart and soul forever.
Here is an article in which i totally agree:

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/blogs/b...108f7.html

Journalism, they say, is the first draft of history but the second and third drafts follow soon after.

Before too long you've got an authorised mini-series starring Richard Roxburgh and there's no turning back.

When it comes to the biggest event in world sport - the World Cup final - the historical die was cast, seemingly forever, about 29 minutes into a two-hour long match.

Except, of course, the first draft of history in this case is wrong. Or at least overly simplistic. Newspaper readers all over the world have already been told that Holland kicked their way to disgrace against free-flowing Spain in Monday morning's match. Generations to come will no doubt get this version also, distilled to a simple good versus evil schematic by intervening decades and hazy nostalgia.

The night that Total Football was betrayed and orange was shown, simply, to be a combination of yellow and red. The night that Holland set fire to its own beautiful legacy. That art and creativity triumphed over cynicism and violence.

Except it didn't and it wasn't - not from where Balls was watching. What a horribly unfair way to see quite an absorbing match.

Twenty-nine minutes was all it took. After a host of Dutchmen had already contributed some fairly unsophisticated challenges, Manchester City's Nigel De Jong raised his boot as the ball flew in and sprigged Xabi Alonso square in the chest. It looked awful, it was awful, but it was not necessarily indicative of the entire 120-minute match and the - entirely legitimate - tactics the Dutch set out to play.

Anyone who has ever played team sport will know that Dutch coach Bert Van Marwijk did not send his men out to kick people in the chest. De Jong's act was an ill-timed, split-second decision that he should, and will, regret. Maybe it should have earned him a red card - but that is debatable and it is not Holland's fault that it did not.

Certainly Van Marwijk did send his team out to be aggressive and to try to frustrate and jostle Spain. As he should have. Where Balls takes issue is with the idea that Holland played anti-football. It has already been repeated so many times that it is now gospel truth: only one side came to play football at the final. The side that tried to play football won. Justice was done.

It was said by the TV commentators, by the online reports, by just about every single newspaper account of the final. What rot.

The underappreciated truth is that Spain - the greatest collection of talent at this tournament - did not play well. The reason this is so is because it was not allowed to. It is said the Spanish dominated - in possession terms they may have. But in terms of executing their game plan and imposing the sort of match they wanted, Holland out-performed its opponents at Soccer City. Clearly.

Spain wanted to control the ball and use weight of possession to debilitate its opponents, it hoped to demoralise Holland as it had a German side that had been a juggernaut until it ran into Spain and could not get near the ball.

To accept these terms - as many now appear to wish Holland had - would have been suicide. The Dutch, instead, tried to play a different way. Their plan was to jostle and disrupt Spain's passing rhythm, to aggressively intrude into its midield space, deny time on the ball and take away the ease of ball movement that typifies the way Vicente Del Bosque's men like to play.

If it could get to half-time level-pegging, Holland would have believed, the match could break its way. The pressure was on Spain to make the play and get the goal. The longer this did not happen, the more recklessly it would commit forward and the sole weakness in an excellent Spanish defence - pace through the middle - could be exploited by the lightning-quick Arjen Robben on the counter.

It so nearly worked. In truth, Spain's best player on the night was probably goalkeeper Iker Casillas. His adroitness off the line saved Spain three times from Robben's deadly runs. It was, though, all a bit much for Craig Foster in the SBS commentary box. The sense of outrage he consistently mustered throughout a lamentably one-sided call was enough to gradually turn Balls from disinterested neutral to sudden Oranje fan.

Foster's love for the beautiful game played the beautiful way makes him a passionate advocate and is a welcome intrusion into the fence-sitting that characterises much punditry. But you sometimes fancy he would send out the Melbourne Knights reserve team to play against Spain with orders to keep possession, stroke the ball around and break down the defence with triangular interplay. What would that achieve?

Spain was good for its tournament win and played some lovely stuff - particularly in the semi-final against Germany. But look at this match in totality. That's all we're saying.

Look at the fact that Andres Iniesta had one of his quietest games for the tournament. Look at his blatant, penalty-seeking dive just minutes before his match-winning goal. Look at Spain's five yellow cards and the - unpunished - Carlos Puyol challenge that stopped Holland taking the lead and should have earned a send-off. Is that pure, unimpeachable foobtall?

Everton's John Heitinga earned a yellow card on 56 minutes for a bad tackle on Villa and a second (and red) on 109 minutes for another bad challenge. In between - a span of 53 minutes (that's more than a half) - Holland received two yellow cards and one of them was for dissent. Spain copped two as well.

After half-time, the Dutch did play football, and good football at that. Certainly it was counter-attacking football but, rest assured, it is not easy to play that way against an opponent as good as the furia roja. The Dutch were compact and organised, they functioned as a unit and played to their strengths. Sitting on a host of yellow cards from the first half, they walked a disciplinary tightrope with admirable nerve.

Their tactics were the right tactics and they so nearly worked. The suggestion that they are not legitimate tactics is deeply unfair. This had been talked up as the Cruyff final, pitting the inventor of total football against the nation that - through Cruyff's long involvement at Barcelona - adopted and perfected it. In truth, with a pragmatic focus on defensive organisation long ago having swept through Dutch football and with Inter Milan's Wesley Sneijder ensconced in midfield, it was more like Cruyff versus Mourinho.

For the second time in a couple of months, then, a major final proved that the Spanish way - the Barcelona way - produces beautiful football but that is not always the most effective way. Certainly it is not the only valid form of the game. Defence is football too.

Spain was a deserved winner and the Dutch could not claim to be aggrieved that they lost. They could, though, take issue with the idea - already now entrenched - that they did not play football. They gave it their best shot and they were not good enough. Sometimes it really is that simple.

Wink
Fre4knc Wrote:Here is an article in which i totally agree:

i totally agree on this too! Yes

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