Soccer, sports and politics (R)

Not getting hooked here.
I will not bite.

OK, I’ll go for that fat worm.
Quote: Ian Rush.
The day football broke my heart was...

When I had to retire. Your mind tells you that you can still play, but your legs are telling you that you can’t. You have to adapt [your life] and it took me two years to do that.

 

Ignore list, make room for luftmensch.!!!!

 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Come on, man!

 

I still have that picture in my mind of Ronaldo towards the end of the match, forlornly waving trying to get someone to pass the ball his way.
But no, so sad.

 

luftmensch said: ↑
(Also, I like playoffs.)

You had many opportunities before...you know!

 

Never mind Boca. From a guy who thinks motel 6 is class tell me more about this 5 star resort in Bora Bora

Friend of mine owned a tea shop in WA State said when he was younger he was waiting for a call from Man ure, ended up playing a couple of seasons with Boca. Had a great time.

 

If I'm not mistaken, we have the same birthday (5/29), so there might be some Zodiac thing going on too.

 

Didn't mean to offend, sorry.

SCUM! YOU ARE DEAD TO ME!!!!

 

I dunno.

In watching Spain, their achilles heel, both in that game, and in this tournament is/was that Morata and the rest of their CFs kinda suck at finishing.

Ronaldo, for all his ego, and all his faults, and all his shortcomings as a player at his age, can still finish. And finish better than anyone in the Spain NT.


Had Spain converted any of their chances, we would be having a far different conversation, insofar as who are the favorites of this tournament, IMO.

 

Well, all Switzerland needed was a finisher.

Specifically Thanos, snapping the nation of Portugal out of existence

 

There isn't a problem, really. This country's sporting landscape is so infected with sports nobody else plays that when we actually DO deign to enter into the real world, we get a dose of reality.
We're not a contender, and that's fine. We don't need to win everything on the basis of bigger/richer.

I can kinda get why someone would follow the USWNT instead of NWSL. The USWNT has deliberately made club ball unimportant in any sort of way chasing salaries from the fed. Women should have been paying to go to NWSL games so they'd have some revenue and wouldn't have to ask for a salary for NT ball. Club ball pays you your true value.

 

This isn't much different from US mens football at a similar stage of development. Certainly pre-MLS few men were making a real living off of football. If US women now can be at least partially supported by their national team duties it is because of their continuous success over the last +25 years.

 

I suppose our women are more advanced as we've had youth leagues for 50 yrs now. The world will catch up.

In the men's game others had a 60-70 year start with their national organizations. We were amateurs for so long.

 

That and slow wings, which puts Spain in the habit of grinding out their goals. They're not in the mindset of counterattacking in a hurry, which works fine under most conditions, but is a problem against the best organized defenses.

 

This is true.

That said, Portugal could/should have an easier time than Spain did, for various reasons, with or without Ronaldo starting.

This is true; I'm also stunned that Enrique left Thiago Alcantara out, in that he has an ability to fashion passes that can bypass opponents' defenses better than Pedri or Gavi can.

 

It's one thing for them to be supported by their NT in the form of a per diem and a few bucks for travel, quite another to take their entire salary from NT ball.

NT duty is a privilege. Club football pays you your true value.

And they'll do it without asking the Fed for a salary.

We've done so many stupid things culturally that I can't even list them all. Baseball. Gridiron. Bowling. Nowhere else on the planet do people think that shit matters.

I'm guilty as well. I posted for years in the cfb and NFL threads in Sports. can remember growing up and not caring about football. That's how American lives- some with culture, some without. If I had attended some university that didn't have a yuge African population and two soccer natties, I'd probably still be as ignorant and backward as my countrymen.

 

Based upon how much the ratings deviate on the women’s side and the overall field depth, the women’s game is basically equivalent to the men’s game of the 1930s.

It can kinda be broken into three groups of teams: early adopters (USA, Norway, Sweden, Germany), new to soccer but big on women’s sport (Canada, Australia, NZ, Japan, S Korea) and “old wealthy soccer countries” (ESP, ENG, ITA, POR, BEL, NED, FRA, AUT, SUI). Denmark and Brazil straddle categories. The third group collectively has closed half of the gap in the the early adopters (collectively) in two cycles. That should continue.

I’m not a fan of the WNT. Not due to gender issues, but because it will be very good for the game when that third group completely closes the gap. What differentiates the men’s international game from every other international team sport (men or women) is the quality and depth of the field. It would be great to see 30+ women’s national teams with a full roster of players who can legit 100% support themselves playing soccer.

If the most consistent global power can expect to win a world title 1 in every 3 tournaments or better and 3-4 teams collectively have a 90% chance of taking the trophy, it doesn’t really hold my interest.