PBP: (EURO 08 Finals) Germany v. Spain [R]

I liked a lot of Andy Gray's commentary in other, non-German games. He's pretty knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and comes down on diving/faking - "In the old days, we just took a 'Is that all you got?' mentality, and got up and kept playing".

But in the German games, pretty much every time the referee made a call in favor of the Germans, Gray was b!tching about it. If a German was fouled, and the referee called it, Gray was moaning "that's not a foul!!". If a German opponent did a standard kick-and-run-into-defender-and-dive move, Gray was b!tching "how was that not a foul??!!", when it was clearly a ridiculous dive. He was also calling for Ballack to be carded on little insignificant fouls. And on and on. Gray's anti-German bias was blatant, and I just wanted reach into the screen and choke him.

 

One thing though: considering our crap defense, it seems like the final touch of the Spanish front runners wasn't too sharp yesterday. Metzelder alone passed several balls to them (I kept wondering if he had gotten color blind and thought they were wearing white shirts) in our third of the field. You would think they would have scored more ...

As to the anti-German bias: people (generally from less successfull footballing cultures) LOVE to call Germany "mediocre", "rubbish", "crap".

Oh, yeah, you underachievers would LOVE to be as "mediocre", "rubbish", "crap" as we are.

 

Well, then don't comment it...

Yes, he was at most mediocre ... but still the best German player on the pitch in my eyes!

Btw: Frings got serious problems only after Hitz was out and he had to deal alone with a Spanish midfield armada.

 

Germany NT haters have never needed much of an excuse to bad mouth our team. The best thing to do is just ignore it or else you will constantly be annoyed.

 

I keep saying this but I have found that from even the most negative sources, the coverage has been 50/50 in this tournament toward germany. Half the people have been objective and used no stereotypes.

 

Don't go on the f#$king defensive when a person makes a comment about your team.

Croatia are as good as they think they are. That's my point. Unlike Turkey, they would have had something to lose, and would probably not have come at Germany like Turkey did.

Hardly played a pass-and-move fluid game all tournament. This was not the croatia of the qualifying stages. Against Germany Croatia was stifling, against Austria they were average, and against Turkey it was not fluid either.

After the resurgence against Portugal, I doubt Germany would have been scared of Croatia. Lots of respect of course, but still confident of going through. Germany don't lose to the same team twice in a tournament.

Who the f#ck said Germany lost because they were complacent? It may be true that they were complacent but that doesn't mean that's why they lost.

You obviously didn't watch germany for the last 3 years then? They were capable of playing that type of football again at any time. Capable of snapping back to that.

I wasn't "complicating" a thing as you can hopefully see from my earlier comments in this post.

 

I don't even know where to start on this, so I won't.

Nah...I would say that aside from the clearly knowledgeable people who never bought into stereotypes, the rest has been 50/50 with their commentary on Germany in this tournament. 50% of it has been objective. That means that they have called the technically good matches as such, and the bad ones as such. Actually I find all the german views in here much harsher than those neutral views.

And everyone who followed germany in not just this tournament knows that this is still a fluid attacking team.

It's like how we know gomez is still a top striker.

 

I bet he was the biggest sweetheart!

Well this is just something that you cannot get away from so I just try my hardest to ignore it and hope people know better.