Yeah, But by far was/is the most polemical of all Cups since 1986. Why?... Will that be because was the latest (& by 'coincidence', the 5th Cup) a country named Brazil won? ...
I wanted Brazil to win the Fianl in 1998 because I could not bear the thought of france doing it. But Brazil never turned up for the final. If France were to have lost to paraguay it would had to have been on Penalties as neither team could score and I certainly don't remember Italy almost beating France but then I might have fallen a sleep by that stage of the tournament. Few people have picked 1998 as the worst which surprises me as it is never great when a team without a forward line wins the competition.
Every World Cup is the worst for the Netherlands. Always start out with so much promise and then collapse. As for this World Cup, I want to go. Come join Team Canada at BigWorldCup.com and let's go. I need you fellow Canucks on my team so we can take down the Americans and English. Come on Canada!
I am not sure they did a lot of collapsing in 1974 or 1978. They were pretty good in the quarter & semi final of 1998 as well.
You're right, Ric. They have had some impressive showings. The Dutch are the team I support on the World Stage, but they always under perform. Those teams in the 70's with Cruyff should have been more successful than they were. You could argue they were the best team of that era and maybe the best team to have never won.
I've watched many games of the Holland 70s team and they certainly did play some of the best football I've seen. They were fluid and direct in their approach, but couldn't win. Truly heartbreaking to lost 2 consecutive finals.
This is a total crock......for a country with a population of about 20 million the Dutch always over perform....yes they lost two world cup finals and both times they played the host country in those finals and were, arguably, the better team in both games....
Surprise, surprise. King Kong arrives and takes the thread off topic. Seriously guys, the population thing has been played out heavily before. The following thread went into this issue in depth, and I think it was conclusively decided that it was a factor. https://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=385418 If you want to carry on the debate, then do it there. Apologies for having to delete many good posts in this thread, but it had gone way off topic.
1990, Only Germany played some exciting football at that tournament. My three favourites for now: 1982, 1986, 2006
The 1994 WC can be summed up like this: Diana Ross missed a pen. Maradona took sum drugs. Baggio missed a pen. It was awful and played in ridiculous heat at stupid times. In 1990 West Germay, Italy and England all had great teams plus Cameroon were the surprise package. 1990 also had more star players than 1994.
1994 had Baggio, Romario, Hagi and Stoichkov as the biggest true stars who performed very well. I don't think 1990 matches it.
1990 had Baggio, Maradona, Matthaus and Gascoigne as the biggest stars who performed very well. Italia90 had a kind of magic that I can't explain maybe because it was my first world cup, I don't know. USA94 just seemed too commercial. I rate the world cups like this 1, 1990 2, 2006 3, 1998 4, 2002 5, 1994
What was great about the England team? They managed exactly one win in regular time out of seven matches, and were dominated by Cameroon for the majority of their quarterfinal game. FIFA themselves considered 1990 the worst WC of all-time and implemented rules to change that four years later.
From this list I can take just Matthaus. The others were indeed ''stars'', but they did not perform at the same level as the ones I mentioned from 1994.
I see what you mean but they had some excellent players in Shilton, Butcher, Pearce, Gascoigne, Platt, Waddle, Beardsley and Lineker. Gascoigne played well at Italia 90. He was arguably England's best player, followed by Platt.
90 and 94 were both pretty dull world cups imo, with 90 shading it as other than Englands success it was a dull competition for me. Also The final must go down as one of the most dull finals ever with Baggios final not far behind. However I remember the Holland vs Brazil game for being quite entertaining from 1994. Also there were more good individual performances in 94 as already stated.
I tend to agree we flattered to deceive in 1990. The Ireland game was poor but the weather was dreadful and Ireland always had the indian sign on us. We played well against Holland. I still think teeh Egypt game was the worst game I have ever seen England involved in. We were fairly lucky against Belgium. Totally outplayed by Cameroon until the penalties and played really well against Germany. Very much a curate's egg.
There are two ways to look at this. 1) The worst world cup for the fans traveling to the USA to catch the games: USA 94 did not give a 'WC feel' at all. I am guessing that most of the traveling fans would have been thoroughly disappointed. I happened to be in NYC at the time of the WC and people simply weren't aware that a WC was going on in their country. And those who were aware, did not grasp the magnitude of the tournament and what it meant for the rest of the world. . No amount of money, organizational excellence or state of the art stadiums can replace local enthusiasm. Though US were great hosts, their team has great potential ( I liked what I saw of them at the confederations cup), but the average Joe couldn't care lesser about the WC. 2) The worst world cup for the fans watching the game at home: Again a tough one between Italia 90 and USA 94. I personally would choose USA 94 as the more boring of the two because the final was horrible. Plain torture. Also, for the first time in the history of the game a team which relied as much on defense as they did on attack won the game. Had Italy won the cup too, the statement would hold true. Hitherto, from the time the modern game began, attack minded teams have won the cup. That changed for ever from WC 94 and ironically it was Brazil ho got the change. Who would have thought that the country that gave us free flowing,replete with short passes and tricks brand of football would also give us a variant that made keeping possession and defensive prowess a cornerstone of their game. So, both things considered, I'd say USA 94 was the worst cup.
The atmosphere of France '98 wasn't a whole lot better than USA '94. There were huge complaints from other UEFA nations about 60% of the tickets to non-France games being allocated to French fans, when France was not as big a football-supporting nation as other countries. There were also complaints from both the French national team and the ultras about real (hardcore) fans being kept out of the stadium to accomodate the snobs.