Its no good jut giving the spot to Donna hoping he will eventually be good enough. Italy should not be a school for players to get better. The keeper who proves to be best should have the no.1 spot. No doubt Donna is good for his age, but he seams to lack agility and struggles to get down. Those long rangers he let in during one single game shoul see him off the team and earn his spot through plying well rather than through the media pushing him. He reminds me of Sebastian Rossi. Perin is too injury prone and also calamity prone. Whoever is no.1 keeper, or any other position, should earn it on the pitch. Tired of seeing guys like Candreva just walk into the team every game. Who knows, maybe its just a dry period. Boxing is going through exactly the same thing, which may have much more to do with economic conditions than football. Maybe we can call up Allan lol, or Diawarra. One thing we must do though, is stop calling 23 year olds young, yea they are young guys but sport is for young guys. you send younger guys to war ffs and 23 is to young to kick a ball about? gtfo you old kunts. Lol. Atackers did not get better. That is quite funny to read that. Attackers today are extremely overrated aand defenders are garbage, as I said, 2 of the best in the world today are a pair of donkeys. If Maradona, Baggio, Signori, Van Basten, just to name a few, were playing today they would score 3,4, 5 goals evrey single game. They could play with zero fear. Just watch vidoeos of the treatment they got whilst scoring goals. Todays players are mostly garbage. if the talent is better today, tell where have all of the good teams gone? Sweden, Norway, Portugal, Chile, Chekz, Romania etc etc, were all strong teams, today most teams are trash. That goes for clubs from those countries too.
Thats crazy to assume. Sports in general are getting better with every generation. For example I believe Connor McDavid is much better then Wayne Gretzky ever was but plays in a much better NHL. Same goes for football. I believe Messi, Ronaldo and Neymar to be much better then Maradona, Pele and Eusebio ever were.
What? I highly doubt that. Maradona and Pele were the best players of all time. Messi and Ronaldo are great players in this generation, but I think Maradona and Pele were best of all time. Then comes Roberto Baggio, and then Messi and Ronaldo. Then you have Zidane, Van Basten, and a few others that I cannot think of.
I can’t for the life of me understand how with better nutrition, better coaching, better facilities, and better exposure to how other teams and players play all over the world, players have somehow.....gotten worse? This makes no sense at all, basketball, baseball, football, tennis, hockey players have literally all gotten better with this but, soccer has gotten ... worse? Nope
No chance. Just watch old videos of Pele and Maradona and compare them to Messi and Ronaldo. Like any sport soccer has evolved.
No it hasn't. The training has just switched to more running and speed, even then. Ronaldo and Messi don't have to go through half of the defensive tenacity that Maradona had to deal with. Gretsky wasn't a powerful skater, but he hardly got hit and was much more elusive. His passing more precise too. Why not wait till McDavid is complete, like Messi, in his career before making comparison between era's that have literally nothing to do with each other. Gretsky's team in the 80's didn't face the defenses of today. Like soccer, the sport flipped. Less focus on defensive systems then, and more now in hockey, vice-versa in soccer. Better nutrition? LOL Better Coaching? Bigger LOL. Better exposure to other teams, from the 90's? No. Twitter isn't better exposure. Shift in focus? Yeah. Better drugs? Yup. Better video games to give the illusion of "evolution". The word itself is hilarious, really. It denotes some sort of mutation that has helped a species cope and survive, and these mutations genetically occur over thousands of years, slowly. Athletes have not undergone any mutations that we know of since the 80's and 90's. Skill training in soccer is not that complicated. Some can hold the ball nearer to their feet and move with it better than others. Focus on making them faster to go along with the focus on more attacking football is the major "evolution" but that's just a shift in focus for fans that demand more goals. The rest are just assumptions backed by nothing at all, even scientifically and I have a bit of insight into that. I'll tell you what's on the increase though. Repetitive strain injuries from over training single movements. This is a documented fact. That is why the focus and money spent on injury rehab and prevention is a gold mine these days. Everyone's scrambling to find a way to slow down the injury process from over training movements, and less focus on movement variability. This is a real measurable thing in sports sciences today, not just a made up theme like "evolution". I used to have the same unproven and naive assumptions and argue the same thing in the 90's. Literally the whole Maradona vs Pele thing was argued, by most on the Maradona side, on "better athletes" being built. Not on tougher competitions at the time. Maradona could run with the ball at higher speeds, but both had amazing touch on the ball that you can't quantify really. Football has devolved defensively, and therefore these fast athletes with good touch look better. It's not that hard to figure out if you were around watching as much then as you are now.
Hard to say.. so it seems out of place to say "much better". McDavid has him on the speed, yet even though he has exceptional vision, he does not hold a candle to what Gretzky could see on the ice. I don't even think McDavid will surpass Crosby in terms of this generation (assuming we can lump them into the same generation)
I agree that today's players are probably generally better than those in prior generations with the advances we have made in technology, nutrition, coaching, etc. That said, I don't think it's fair to compare guys like Messi to Pele. You need to look at what players did versus their respective competition. Someone like Pele was able to dominate his competition like arguably no one else has. Therefore, when we talk about the best of all-time, it's unfair to slight some like Pele or Maradona because they played in the past and didn't benefit from the advances in the way we train and cultivate talent these days. You can compare players against others in their own generation. Candidly, I'm not sure Baggio would have flourished in today's game the way he did back in the 90s where more individual creative freedom was encouraged.
Defenders use to foul ruthlessly prior to the 90’s and red and yellow cards were not given nearly as much as they are today. The game has changed and the players are faster but if you give Pele , Best and Cruyff the same training methods , nutrition or whatever as Messi or Ronaldo, I’m willing to bet they will have been just as successful as they were back then. Maybe even better and definitely more disciplined.
The anwser is clear as to why the new generation is weak... DIVING. And the guilt is on the previous generation of stars who would take the easy way out when the game could not be turned by their play alone. Guilty persons include Robben,Torres, Nani, Suarez,Young, Ronaldo, Ramos, Drogba, Bale, Di Maria. The new gen of players grew up watching these guys getting away with it, it became normalized and it's something you could get away with most of the time so players started to take this new angle into account. I blame the 2002 World Cup as the turning point, that was a tourney where South Korea got away with so much, Italian players were attacked, fouled, and the Norks from the south would pimp fouls for their own gain and they got away with it. Ronaldo being such a marketable force started to get more leniancy with it and a free kick in front of the 18 makes for entertaining drama in a 90 minute game that was seen as a way to market the game to people who thought it was boring so they let it go on and on. The reason Messi is the best in the world is because he keeps his feet and keeps going when hacked, he has last this ability to withstand tackles in age, but for so long he played soccer the way the game used to be played. Belotti has the body and size to play the game right, if he learns to use it as leverage, he could dominate in the attacking third.
I cant find it, but there was a video showing Neymar playing for Santos and he absolutely would get shut down often by defenders, their hard defending would not let him get by, it then showed many dives by him.
its is really sad to realize the decline of the NT. We may never see a midfielder of Totti's talent ever again or defenders with great football iq and tackling ability. There is really no midfielder who is Italian who looks to become one of the worsts best. Marco is far too injury prone and he stat pads in a weak league, he has yet to take over a game for the NT as well... at his best, he is a very quick and well reactive midfielder who would excel with a supporting cast, but cant take over when he is isolated by himself( as we saw this past campaign). Marco's strenght is playing good clean balls to his team mates and outdribbling a guy or two at the most, he does not seek to score goals and because out this, he will only shoot as a last resort on impulsively on a first touch when he is at the 18. That is the saddest thing to me, no game changing midfielders. I think Rugani can be competent complimentary defender, but Giorgio will have to always guide him. So it is up to Romagnoli or Caldara to take up the the top spot. Who is going to guide this midfield for the future?
Totti wasn't a mid, and we didn't have any game-changing mids for like 20 years until Pirlo showed up. We also won a WC with Materazzi so reeling off great-defenders of the past is misleading because you only need 2 on the field. That's got little to do with our decline. I'd say bad management is the main culprit. I mean our most gifted forward has ridden the bench under the last two managers and neither were too interested in 'midfield play' so how can you judge? Going forward, I think we're in good shape (for a first 11) but might have some problems with depth up forward. Midfield group of Verratti, Jorghino, Pellegrini, Gagliardini, Locatelli, Bennassi, Christante? etc should be fine. But we need 2-3 more players to get on Insigne's level to give us options in the winger/SS areas. That's probably the real concern.
Interestingly, if Nesta didn’t go down in the 2006 World Cup , Matrix may very well have never featured. For that matter , it’s most likely no one would have scored the way he did or provoke Zidane into getting a red card. Italy owes quite a lot to Materazzi.
Today's game at club level is more open. He had, what, 7 knee surgeries for a variety of conditions from the brutal tackling that happened in that day, most of which has been almost eliminated today, and Baggio was very elusive and hard to stop. Hard to say. His dribbling on the run was fantastic. Who do you consider better, Matrix or Chiellini? Materrazzi was third in pecking order on that Italy. Just saying.
Materrazzi that year was better than a younger Chiellini who was just getting started at Juve. I don't know if Chiellini could have made the 2006 squad, at least as a starter. He wouldn't have been able to overtake Cannavaro , Nesta or Matrix. He will have been able to make the squad as a reserve over Cristian Zaccardo though....
You might be onto something. I wouldn't single out only Ronaldo but all the marquee players that market the game. The NHL used to protect guys like Gretzky and Lemieux where you couldn't touch them without getting a penalty. And the NBA is notorious for protecting it's stars, especially in the playoffs. If the refs were mandated to ignore diving, we would surely see the toughness return to the game in all positions. But it might be less marketable, though.