CONGRATULATIONS TO VFL WOLFSBURG!!! One of the best and entertaining Champions League Finals of all time. Men and women. So proud of this team. After a slow start at the beginning of the season, after winning the treble and some changes on the team, the game flow wasn`t there yet. I had the feeling that Wolfsburgs season really started,when Simic scored the 1:0 for Potsdam in the 2 Leg of the CL Semi ( for me already a Classic ),which ignited the fighting spirit of Wolfsburg. These last two CL games from Wolfsburg showed, why they are back to back Champions. Never giving up, showing heart and an iron will. Tyreso played a brilliant first half and took their chances and contributed to a great final. My predictions still stands that we will see 3 german teams in the CL next year, but honestly I`m not that sure anymore Whatever happens, this title was the most important one in this season and Kessler and Müller are my MVPs of the game. P.S. Goodbye Conny Pohlers......a legend of the game.
Wolfsburg is simply a better team than Tyresö. Marta and Press's individual brilliance in the three goals they scored wasn't enough. Also Today we saw the difference between really good midfielders and world class midfielders. Keßler and Goeßling owned Vero and Seger in the second half. Oh and Røddik was absolutely terrible.
Her first goal was very nice indeed; her second, astonishing. And Boquete is her equal in terms of passing, I think; she can put a pass on on dime, through the air, from a 40 meters away, while running at speed. Just a suggestion – you might like to check some stats, like who were the goalscorers.
That it was Vero Boquete who scored Tyresö's second goal. No other ulterior motive, simply fact checking.
I know she scored the second goal, but if you remember Christen Press' made a fantastic horizontal run across the entire back line of Wolfsburg and then set Vero up to score with a lovely assist. Thats why I said brilliance from Press.
Ah, okay, I see. From a grammatical standpoint, your pronoun 'they' should refer back to 'Marta and Press'. Don't mind me, I've got unclear antecedents on the brain these days. (you would too, after reading physicist's lab reports for 8 hours...)
It could be seen as pedantic, but, as a grammar teacher, I fully appreciate Jocasta's precision. Edit: unless Jigsawill wanted to refer to "Tyresö" with "they", but, even ignoring for a moment the problem if a single team, being a collective entity, can be properly referred as "they", the pronoun should have referred back to the closest antecedent, or, at the very least, we could say the referent was quite unclear in that sentence.
But aren't you usually using a plural verb with teams? E.g. "VfL Wolfsburg are a very good team" and not "is a very good team". Btw. are there any good highlights of the match?
Yes, I guess so, although this is a point where I can't really help: I am a teacher of Italian grammar, not English grammar, so I am really not sure about this particular aspect (you know, in Italian, we normally talk about teams using the singular: e.g. "Il Milan vince la partita di oggi" = "Milan AC wins today's game"). So, I suppose using the plural in English is correct but I am not sure about that. What I am sure is that normally the pronoun should refer to the closest referent and so the sentence was at least ambiguous, since "Marta & Press" was a closer referent than "Tyresö".
this is a point upon which british and american usage vary. in america teams are always it. in britain teams are always they. only the french have it right: teams are always she. supporters lyonnais, c’est le moment de chanter! encourageons l’équipe aimée, avec nous elle va gagner!
In Germany we totally screw it up. We say e.g. "Deutschland spielt beschissen" => "Germany plays like shit (singular)" but when we use a personal pronoun we don't use he/she/it but they + plural verb instead. Doesn't make any sense and I hate it.
In French, "team" is she (équipe), but "club" is he. Hence, the masculine gender given to the names of the clubs when we speak about them : L'équipe de Lyon a été éliminéE. Lyon est éliminé. Of course, Guignol, I chose this example only because we are on the CL's thread
I was so bored I changed the channel. It was a great final but I still didn't like this season as a whole. Tyreso had the luck of the draw. How on earth can a finalist run of of gas after one half? Bizzare. Credit to Wolfsburg. What a great come back. Deserved winners and probably without any doubts the best team in Europe at the moment.
I don't want to start that argument here. We can talk about it in the BL thread. But I agree with you nonetheless.
”Come for the football, stay for the unbridled pedantry” is a good unofficial motto for this forum. I’ll admit that I have an automatic impulse to say ’they’, but then I usually correct myself to ’it’, in large part to avoid exactly the sort of misunderstanding that started this whole mess. Calling a team ’it’ also has the semantic advantage of implying that the team is an individual entity, an entity that takes on its own emergent properties. Ah, grammatical gender: so difficult for some second language learners like myself to truly understand (why? one sits in the class and wonders; what is the blankety-blank point of having gender? it serves only to perplex and confuse). At this point, I’ll throw in a fun fact about Swedish (and probably some of its close relatives). The two genders are neuter and everything else. To wit: Marta [an everything else] är fantastisk_, men försvaret [a neuter] var inte så fantastiskt igår. (I’ve probably screwed that up somehow.)
Right, back to the football for a moment. I’d say this is like taking candy from a baby, but it’s more like offering someone the choice between having a piece of candy and not having a piece of candy. Did you see that third goal? In the heat of the moment, and with that goal that put my team ahead (! a totally unexpected state of affairs) again (!! doubly unexpected)... yes, in that moment, Marta was the best player in the world. O... kay. No argument that Wolfsburg had a better game. But you undercut your own argument that it was a great comeback when you stress that Tyresö ran out of gas. And let’s all remember that it was very close; 4-3 with three changes of lead is hardly a proper whuppin’. I’m disappointed, yes, but in the light of day (and an unusually warm and pleasant day at that) I can remember that Tyresö stood up to Wolfsburg far better than I expected them too. So time for me to everything else up and... Yes yes, congrats to Wolfsburg. Still proud of Tyresö.
I was being sarcastic and daring you to call be delusional. I personally do not believe in labeling players as the best in the world as it is meaningless accolade. The fact of the matter is you can't compare individual players across teams. One player might me completely successful in a particular team environment and useless on another team.
Right. You’re not delusional at all. (But I’m concerned; you sound like you may have a cold.) You helped to clarify my point. In that moment, for me (because I can’t really speak from any other person’s perspective, now, can I?), she was the best player in the world. Fortunately, my statement hardly counts as an accolade, because who on earth gives a hoot what I think? And you of course are free to refrain from making any such foolish, enthusiastic statements, like the one I had made. I’m not quite sure I entirely buy your argument that one can’t compare individual players on any objective level. I played football once. I feel quite secure in saying that Marta is a better player than I was. No, no, I’m quite sure I have not compromised my objectivity with that one! But once you move outside of an absurd case like that last one, it becomes difficult to compare, absolutely.
Not likely as I think Jessica Fishlock is the best player right now. Well at least the most underrated. I'm hoping against hope that Wales qualifies for the world cup so she can show what she can do on the biggest stage
Marta was fantastic and certainly delivered as did Alex Popp. What a match. Not sure what happened to Klingenberg but she had a solid game before something happened to her leg. Edlund who didn't seem mentally prepared is the obvious mark for the backbreaking third goal, but after watching it all transpire you understand why when players are injured they stay down a long time. It gives the bench time to prep a player and organize formation. Was there a camera angle showing the Swedish back line on Müller's second goal? They showed a flash of a replay that looked like she might have been behind the defenders but it was a skewed angle and way too quick to tell. A football match is full of ill fate for both sides and champions are the ones who take the cards dealt and turn them into a winning hand. Wolfsburg showed enormous mental strength as the game wore on and collectively willed the result. You had the feeling right from the get-go in the second half they were the hunter and not the hunted. Thought we might get a tie in the 95th but it was not to be. Deserving champions, deserving silver-medalists and a super finale to the tournament.
just as those who learn such languages at a later age will always make mistakes related to gender no matter how proficient they become generally, those whose minds were formed from birth with languages which have genders can only grasp your question intellectually; gender in language seems just as natural to them as gender itself and i can definitely see a real and very elegant semantic and grammatical utility in them. let's go back to blissett's observation: "normally the pronoun should refer to the closest referent". this is a fundamental rule of sentence structure. but in a language like french that requires concordance in gender (and number) you have possibilities of constructing sentences that are longer, with a freer hand for rhythm and other stylistic effects, and still keep them coherent and unambiguous: the female plural complement clearly refers back to a female plural, no matter how distant in the sentence, or how many other subjects, objects and complements there are in between. there is another effect that perhaps strikes only me as a foreigner, but i don't think it's completely lost on autochtones: some words like personne, victime... are feminine but can refer to either men or women. and though no concrete example comes to mind right now, i've often felt that such words were chosen very deliberately for reasons of stylistic or psychological effect.