Skip to main content

Auf Wiedersehen, Pet

By

Well, evidently I didn't shake my crystal ball hard enough today. While I got the sense of an earth-shattering shock, I was looking in entirely the wrong direction. No tantrums, relatively limited rolling around - although frustratingly careless in front of goal - Team Neymar (aka Brazil) eased their way past Serbia with a minimum of fuss. I do wonder if the sloppiness in front of goal & Neymar's propensity to try to do too much, will catch them out further down the line... and a tough match awaits with Mexico. But for now they roll on...

As do Switzerland, a dynamic and interesting team, who I want to spend the rest of this post talking abou...................AHHHHHHHHH, who I am kidding. THEY'RE OUT! GONE! No more! Die Mannschaft are going home, this early in the tournament for the first time since 1938. Superb stuff. Finally, after XX years of hurt, and too many cruel defeats at the hands of the German machine to mention, they've gone and pulled an England! Bottom of their group, but more telling - that is precisely where their play deserved. They have stunk the place out since Game 1. Lacking shape, a true front man and an uncharacteristic shaky defence. There's no hard luck story to look back on here, and they provided some fine memories in their final appearance:

  • Having been stuck in the car for the game, I was treated to an embarrassingly excited Chris Sutton shouting at me through my car radio and laughing with ZERO professional commentator filter as he urged Son to walk the ball in the net for the second. I'm not sure I would vouch for his 'game insight', but if you're looking for 100% biased gloating, Chris is your man! 
  • A great performance from the South Korea goalie, pulling off some great saves during the game
  • A fantastic knack of making sure all of their best chances fell to their centre half who was clearly never going to score, even if he stayed on the pitch for a warm-down. 
  • The jewel in the crown for VAR at this tournament. A sublime pick up for the first goal that was simply impossible to catch in real time. Toni Kroos coming through with the assist, perfectly nutmegging his teammate. The end result... the best VAR induced delayed celebration in history! (ok, it's a short history... but). The Koreans, already out and with nothing to play for, went bonkers after the final reveal as if they had just won the Price is Right: South Korea score!!!
  • And finally, and this won't sail from the memory for a while.... a mind-blowing brain fart by Manuel Neuer. After standing between the sticks watching 270 minutes of cr@p in front of him, he decided to take matters into his own hands, leaving his goal unattended so he could help his desperate teammates. However, while most keepers do the common thing and charge up front, Manny saw the game differently, slotting into the left wing-back role. Bizarre. (It didn't end well!)
 And that's it. But it may well be that the Germans' have the last laugh. With the deckchairs out, waiting for the second round to come, England are now faced with the almighty dilemma that a 2nd place finish (via defeat to Belgium) would throw us into the 'easy' side of the draw. Even having exited the tournament, the Germans have played with our minds once more. I say go for it against the Belgians, and take whatever comes... the minute we start to think about any side of the draw being 'easy', is when we will need to start packing our bags for home...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Azteca

By
 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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Geography lessons

By
 I'm writing this as Cape Verdi's masterplan is 9 minutes in, versus the mighty (but missing some players) Spain. They are the second nation (after Curaçao) that I didn't even know was a nation - and I have a degree in geography. So, let me share my learning. Curaçao, a Caribbean island has been a country in its own right since 2010. Prior to that, its the usual depressing story of European colonisation, abandonment (when the Europeans realised it wasn't stacked full of precious metals), reinvigorated interest (slave trade) and finally a degree of independence.  Cape Verdi on the other hand is a country (Island nation off the west coast of Senegal) that is older than I am, so I feel I should know better in their case. Again it has history of being a European colony and is another epicentre of the slave trade.  With this in mind, the needle matches to look out for later in the tourney are Curaçao vs Netherlands and Cape Verdi vs Portugal. After Curaçao's outing last...
Post a Comment
Read more

One bar of 4G

By
 I'm back, within close proximity of World Cup telly. For a while (after discovering a remote cidery), there was a chance that I'd miss more of this tournament - but after an unexpected sleep in a field, my camp trip has finished without further incident. The footy gods seemingly smiled upon me, as the one bar of 4G reception, whilst often unable to load a web page, did somehow manage to give me solid BBC sounds audio. And with that, I have largely kept in touch with proceedings.  The biggest challenge has been sleep to be honest. Last night, in a cider-induced fever dream, I managed to take in the first half of Morocco v Brazil, which then spliced itself together with the second half of Scotland v Haiti - which was weird. What was more weird was that in between , I had a dream about Tyrone Mings, on horseback, making a rash challenge that managed to destroy both his own knees and the horses existence. But this is something I should speak to a therapist about, rather than leav...
Post a Comment
Read more