Watching Ziyech & Hakimi combo down the right makes me wonder what would have been had we signed him. Obviously would be rotating with Reece or maybe would settle Reece at RCB and Hakimi at RWB for Tuchel, but it'd be devastating. Shame he chose PSG of all teams. 

Spain were unlucky (how unlucky?), but their luck could change if they arrange to knock on wood

2 minutes ago, PloKoon13 said:

Spain were unlucky (how unlucky?), but their luck could change if they arrange to knock on wood

Have you been watching Casablanca again?

4 minutes ago, PloKoon13 said:

Spain were unlucky (how unlucky?), but their luck could change if they arrange to knock on wood

What a beautiful upset. Hope Morocco do it again in the Quarters. 

1 hour ago, just said:

What is it with this "modern" technique of slowly walking up to the spot, or doing a hop, skip and jump, and then side footing it at 3mph.

It was better in the old days. Run at the ball full pelt from at least 10 yards, and leather it as hard as you possibly can.

Couldn't agree more.

In fact, I just had to re-watch David Luiz doing exactly that in the CL Final Shoot Out against Bayern in 2012. I like to watch that penalty a few times a year LOL, 

Portugal has looked very good but they are a very good team. They just have similar problem to united. It is a very easy fix from football pov. 

The way this is all turning out, 9 of our 12 World Cup players are going to come home fresh as a daisy.

Thiago Silva, Kovacic and Ziyech are the three that are featuring most on the pitch ... I guess Ziyech won't play much for us anyway, so that one's no biggie LOL.

Mount, Gallagher watching from the sidelines ; Sterling will probably be joining them now, regardless of his personal issues.

 

Spain got what they deserved by dropping Azpi LOL

Edited December 6, 20223 yr by Sexyfootball

Portugal drop Ronaldo and they play their best football in over a decade. 

Terrible news about Sterling, but at least it gives him an earlier trip home before Sunday!

Spain got exactly what they deserve, bench a striker ( who's actually in good form) and passed the ball around for 130 minutes. It's like going to a street fight and expect to win by points, not throwing any big punches. How the hell they still find a place for Busquet when they have so many MF options? No leader in the team, no creativity, just like a Spanish version of Chelsea.

Did anyone see that dribble from Boufal? I think Llorente is still searching for him. What a baller...

Wow that was some match last night, Portugal played the best football of the tournament and that was without Ronaldo, Cancelo and Neves.

They picked apart Switzerland with first time touches and great movement and Gonzalo Ramos's finishing was sublime.

The first hat-trick in international tournament football since 1990.

Around the 66th minute at 4-0 up the Portuguese chanted 'Ronaldo, Ronaldo' at 4-0 up they didn't need him so seemed more of a recognition of times past and a goodbye. 

If they can keep that level of performance they can win the competition, yet of course next up is the ultra-defensive Moroccans and a different challenge.

 

10 hours ago, wizardous said:

What a baller...

Great Juanma Lillo interview/essay. It is ostensibly about the World Cup, but mostly is about the death of romance in football:

https://theathletic.com/3981374/2022/12/08/juanma-lillo-world-cup/

 

Football’s finished and now whatever this is has emerged, I don’t dare name it. The purpose of the game has been subverted — now they’re looking more for consumers than fans, the industry needs TV money.

But, even so, I’ve seen every game at this World Cup, I always do.

I prefer international football to club football because, for me, the best players come together for international football, and so the interactions between them are richer. I could prove it to you — I’ve got notes on thousands of games between 1950 and 1990. Twelve terabytes’ worth are sitting on my desk in front of me.

The best players come together for international football and, thank God, they’re not trapped by the omnipotence of the manager, because there’s no time to coach. It’s wonderful, the fact that managers can’t change the game as much at a World Cup for the ones who really matter — the players.

It really is wonderful because we, the managers, have too much influence. It’s unbearable. We have our own ideas and we say that we espouse them to help people to understand the game. Bullsh*t! It should be for the players to understand the game as they understand it.

And everything is globalised now. At club level, if you go to a training session in Norway and one in South Africa, they’ll be the same. ‘Look inside to find spaces outside’, ‘pass here, pass there’. The good dribblers are over, my friend. Where can you find them? I can’t see any.

I watch all the tournaments in the world. I’m working in Qatar now, I was in England recently. Japan, China, South America… well, in South America you can still find a skillful player with qualities taught on the street rather than an academy.

We don’t even realise the mess we’ve made. We have globalised a methodology to an extent that it’s crept into the World Cups: if you got the Cameroon and Brazil players to change shirts at half-time you wouldn’t even realise. Maybe with the tattoos or the yellow hair, but not the performance.

Everything is ‘dos toques’. Two touches. Because they all train with two touches, they all play with two touches. We’ve enforced ‘El Dostoquismo’, as I call it.

And I say this as a big exponent of a lot of these methods and ways of thinking! I’m like a regretful father.

If there was one person I would really like to take issue with now, it would be me from 25 years ago. Don’t trust anybody who says they don’t regret anything in life.

But anyway, this World Cup. I remember Tunisia–Denmark from the first week. It was my favourite game; 0-0 but it was full of chances. Even more than in Spain’s 7-0 win against Costa Rica, where, by the way, they played so, so well. With the right tempo, right spaces, quick execution…

Spain were unlucky to come up against two teams, in Japan and Morocco, who did not feel the need to open up spaces in their defence to try to win the game.

Morocco’s approach was that when the opponent had the ball 50 metres from their goal, they acted like they were 10 metres away. A lot of teams have done that in this World Cup.

Morocco did not sit very deep against Spain, sometimes they defended 10 metres outside their area.

It’s true that it might have looked like it needed Spain to put more balls into the box, try to provoke random actions and go for the second ball, but then to win the second ball you need to press higher and be really close to the opponent. If that second ball goes to Hakim Ziyech or Sofiane Boufal — what a player he is by the way! — and they dribble up the pitch, set up a counter and score a goal, everyone will criticise you as well.

It’s funny now how everyone talks about high block, low block… the only blocks that I know are apartment blocks. With a garage? Without a garage? This eagerness to find vocabulary that makes football more difficult to understand pisses me off. Whatever block Morocco had, it was a lot of players working in conjunction with each other, paying an incredible desire not to open up spaces.

It is getting harder and harder to overcome this approach. Teams can move a whole line — midfield line, defensive line — from one side of the pitch to the other almost quicker than the ball can travel. You have to have a lot of quality to beat it.

Spain were so worried about getting caught that they didn’t really risk certain passes inside.

It was the opposite with Argentina when they lost against Saudi Arabia; they were trying to make the killer pass too soon, and when you do that, you’re exposed to the counter-attack. Against Poland, Argentina changed some players but above all they were more patient, they chewed things over and improved.

But I wouldn’t dare to say which team has been the best because they are all so similar and the players are so identical.

It’s true now that there aren’t bad players any more. But there are no exceptional players either. In trying to kill the bad guys, we’ve killed the good guys, too.

There are some trends from this World Cup — and not all bad! I think that we’ve seen how teams, when they’re losing, have been more themselves, they dared to do more things. And then when they equalised, suddenly they made a step back again. That’s happened a lot.

And one thing that we should start considering more: there are more and more goals from cutbacks, or backwards passes.

Because teams try to play as far as they can from their own goal, when they break through the opponent’s defensive line they’re going so quickly that the players in the middle go ahead of the one who has the ball out wide. I used to say in Manchester that the last player to arrive to the box is the first one to be able to shoot. I tell that to my strikers all the time: the closer you get to the goal, the further you are from scoring.

Every team is so concerned about defending and controlling the spaces close to their goal that there are now more threats from
further away.

Sometimes you need to step back.

So let’s talk about perspective. People talk about Cristiano Ronaldo not starting in the last 16 for Portugal and it being a great decision. This was already covered by Greek philosophers: fine is whatever ends fine. But until it ends we don’t say anything, just in case…

This is called opportunism, simple as that.

How many of the opinions that you hear about football were said at the start of matches? Pay attention to what is said before the game — as long as it has some reasoning, of course. After the game, everyone is clever.

You know that if Portugal had lost 2-0 then it would have been a terrible decision to leave out Ronaldo. “How on Earth are you giving the No 9 shirt to a kid who’s been in elite football for four days?”

I sometimes think that the 90 minutes of a game are almost an inconvenience to some people who just want to praise the winners and talk sh*t about the losers.

So I’ll tell you things that I believed before the tournament. I don’t want to be an opportunist!

For me, England and Portugal are the two teams with the biggest number of elite players in an age group that will also give them good chances in the future. One player I’m crazy about for England and hasn’t played at all — James Maddison. I love this guy, he excites me.

He’s an authentic footballer, more of a street product than an academy product. He’s daring. He has nerve. A manager can tell him to do A, but if he believes B is the right option, he’ll do B.

I just love this. Any idea that comes into James Maddison’s head is 100 times better than any idea you will find at any coaching conference.

Look at the quality that England have in their squad, and even some of the guys who have been left out!

And then Portugal… the young centre-back from Benfica, Antonio Silva, is not even playing. Do you know how good this kid is? Incredible. He’s absurd.

The guy who replaced Ronaldo, Goncalo Ramos… I’m more surprised that when Ronaldo does not play, Rafa Leao is not the replacement.

I’m more like, ‘Wow, Leao is not playing, is something happening with him?’. But then there’s Ramos, a guy who is capable not just of scoring three goals, but every time he was in contact with the ball he made the move better. He improved everything. He was really clean. And Joao Cancelo is capable of making better decisions in the final third than most attackers.

It’s difficult for me to highlight more new players — basically because I already knew them. And I’m not doing that to big myself up, but because there is so much scouting and so much analysis that barely any player seems new to us anymore.

You watch Sofyan Amrabat against Spain — I already knew him. I hadn’t seen him doing a performance as complete as on Monday, but I know how he is as a player.

Years ago, the World Cup was also about discovering new footballers from unknown countries. They had their own characteristics, they weren’t identikit players like nowadays.

This scouting is like picking mushrooms in the forest, as we do in Spain. If you go to the forest after 7am you’ll see that all the trees are depleted, people have already been and taken all the good mushrooms. With footballers it’s just the same. Everyone has been there and seen them all. It’s difficult to find a mushroom that someone has not already picked.

Are you wondering how we get football back to how it was? Forget it. The type of person who plays football is different now, but that happens in every field: music, art, whatever. We are formed by the culture around us and the new generations will get used to VAR as a natural thing — do not get me started on that. Or statistics either.

You and the context that you are in are the same thing. Take the cactus, for example. Years ago, a cactus did not have spines. We adapt to the environment, the context we’re living. And so, over time, the cactus grew its spines. That’s what we have now.

This column was written in conjunction with our journalists Sam Lee and Pol Ballus after a video call in Spanish.

Croatia remind me of us. Pass the ball around nicely, but any time they move forward, it just goes backwards again.

Annoying there could of been a world where Hazard, Modric, and KDB would be playing for us. 

The other night it was the Japanese fans know it's the Brazilians this constant banging of drums and continuously singing one bloody song. This is even worse when like me you're not at home and watching on a laptop with headphones on. Just imagine going to the Bridge some prick or pricks in this case banging drums and chanting come on Chelsea for 90 minutes. Also having to listen to Spurs are the better team Jermaine Jenas doesn't help either.

27 minutes ago, Sconnie Blue said:

Annoying there could of been a world where Hazard, Modric, and KDB would be playing for us. 

Modric wanted to join us. José decided he didn't want KdB.

Quite a few players on this game we've been linked with, as well as Silva, Kova and Pasalic : Neymar (displaying the form we've come to expect from our big-money strikers today), Raphina, Gvardiol, Perisic, Richarlison

I dont remember the Zagreb keeper being this good ?

Half this Brazil squad look the same from above, with their short bleached hair. Can't tell who anyone is half the time.

2 minutes ago, Zeta said:

Half this Brazil squad look the same from above, with their short bleached hair. Can't tell who anyone is half the time.

Not Thiago Silva, that's all I know.

It's hard supporting Silva but actually not giving a flying f**k about Brazil.

Edited December 9, 20223 yr by Valerie

3 minutes ago, Zeta said:

Half this Brazil squad look the same from above, with their short bleached hair. Can't tell who anyone is half the time.

Gazza has a lot to answer for.

Brazil's tumbles are getting more artistic.

He may have 77 goals level with Pele but not on goal average.