Skip to main content

Rich rewards

To my surprise, South Korea vs Algeria turned out to be an absolute belter. Algeria (or France B, as they should be called) seemed to have a squad personality transplant; shifting from dour defensive outfit into rampant attacking machine. They scored more goals in 12 minutes than they had in the 28 preceding years of World Cup finals. Granted they were up against a woeful S.Korea team, but a great performance nonetheless, for a 4-2 victory. 

Then another treat in the late game with USA just seconds away from a mammoth win against a rejuvenated Portugal team. They were so unlucky to concede a potential tournament ending equaliser after a truly heroic performance.

This evening has seen Spain salvage some pride against Australia and Holland taking advantage of Chile in a game where neither team looked too bothered. 

The rest of the qualifying group deciders should be far more interesting as there is so much to play for, not least for Brazil...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Azteca

 Well, this one has crept up on me hard! I've barely had time to recover from Villa's Europa League win a fortnight ago; distracted all the while with SkySports trying to sell off our squad to The Big Six and reading stories of the thunderstorms and the visa complexities facing fans, players and referees of countries that Trump doesn't like today - and yet now here we are, listening to Gary Neville self reflecting on his own career as a scene setter for the World Cup. This one is a weird one. The expanded format and cruel time-zone scheduling mean that I go into it with no ambitions to 'watch it all'. The group stages are, on paper, almost devoid of any real jeopardy. The bloating of the tournament means there are now more groups than realistic winners, and with that, of course, no groups of death. And to cater for the stupid total number of teams which has to be 8,16,32 or even 64 dammit - just no other actual number; we have the awful spectacle of most  3rd place ...

I am numb

The England match left me numbed. Unimpressive, uninspired, lacklustre – however the bottle of champagne I enjoyed with the game certainly took the edge off things. It seems that we, along with France and Italy are suffering some horrendous ‘anti-football’ affliction. If the game was less global then we could put it down to ‘a long hard season in the Premier league’ or ‘the difficulty of being motivated for national team games when the premier league pays so well’; but neither is valid. Neither is this jibulabulani ball business. The teams who pass to each other seem not to suffer. Poor selections and poor play has blighted us, and whilst lots of vitriol heads in the direction of Heskey, we’d do well to remember that the main culprits on Friday were Gerrard and Rooney for having zero patience on the ball and terrible control. Lampard wasn’t much better. At least Barry gave us some sort of stable platform to build from. I expect the introductions of Joe Cole and Jermain Defoe or Peter...

The Lalas factor

Famous for having a very ginger goatee in 1994. He also managed LA Galaxy, (yes THE galaxy), before getting fired after winning errrm, nothing. A fine CV in which to impart his wisdom. Welcome to ESPN's premier 'soccer' analyst for the next month here in the US. However, I am particularly excited by this development - a stroke of genius by the programming masterminds - in the space of about an hour, he has given me a month's worth of material..... "well, when you think about it, Bob Bradley has done as much as Fabio Capello in his career" "US to win 2-1 on Saturday, I see England getting out of their group but not sure after that" "but what kind of defensive message does this send to the players - I can't agree" (in response to a scarily great tactical suggestion by John Harkes - yes of Sheff Wed fame - to play Landon Donovan, the US' best player, behind the striker to exploit the fact that neither Lampard or Gerrard will ultimately...