Tag: sports

That’s my prediction for tomorrow. I think Spain are, with one exception, the better team. And unlike England or Norway or even France, they are a very good team. But they lack firepower, and as much as I like Yamal and Nico Williams with their speed on the side, they haven’t had a very good tournament and I suspect Argentina’s street gang tactics will manage to disrupt them.

Argentina reminds me a lot of the 2001 Patriots. They have a spirit and a drive that appears to be only matched by FIFA’s desire to send Messi out with a second World Cup trophy. When every attention-seeking Instagram influencer who can find an Argentina jersey is dancing to RESPETENS LOS RANGOS and the team reacts to every foul on Messi like a rabid pack of outraged wolves, it’s pretty clear that something unusual is in the air.

The contrast between the total indifference of the Portuguese team to Ronaldo and the teary-eyed reverence of the Argentine players for their longtime captain isn’t merely striking, it’s significant. Football is a team sport. The more players are willing to run for each other, work for each other, and fight for each other, the higher the team’s ceiling becomes. Norway lost to England because Sorloth wasn’t willing to submit his striker’s instinct to keep the ball and score to the team’s need for him to pass to Halland, while there isn’t a single Argentine player who wouldn’t made that pass.

This Argentine team is one of the few that has definitely reached its ceiling. Whether that is enough to defeat an excellent Spanish team that is better almost man-for-man across the roster, and can put its own Ballon d’Or winning midfielder, Rodri, up against Messi, is what we will have to wait to see. I think the X-factor may be that Messi knows the Spanish players, and the system, as well as he knows anything in football. He is a Barcelona legend, after all, so he knows everything about the entire Spanish roster.

The king winning one last crown, then riding off into the sunset is the fairy tale ending. Logic and data analysis tells us that Spain should win this game. And yet, I somehow don’t think they will.

DISCUSS ON SG

It was a very good game. Very chippy in the first half, as expected, but like the France-Spain semifinal, one of the more entertaining matches of the Mondiale. England’s goal was magnificent, but it didn’t escape either manager’s notice that it was against the run of play. I thought at the time – not after the fact, like a lot of commenters now that the results are known – that it was a big mistake to switch into a defensive mode and try to hold on against the very experienced reigning World Champions.

I actually thought Argentina was a bit sloppy and careless, particularly at the back, until after England scored. In addition to sparking the change in England’s tactics, it also served to focus the Argentines; they would have scored almost right away if it weren’t for a fantastic return and last-ditch tackle by Jed Spence.

I thought the game was over after that 15-second span when Argentina nearly scored three times. Pickford was playing out of his mind in the English goal, but what works against teams like Mexico and Norway was never going to work against Argentina. They could have scored 7 times in the last 20 minutes, and only two posts, Messi deciding to waste time at the very end, and Pickford’s heroics kept the final score from being worse.

I thought England did very well against a better team, and while I would have gambled on trying to score a second goal and winning the game outright rather than trying to hold on, I understand why Tuchel decided to go defensive and it’s entirely possible that the end result would have been even worse. Again, England’s goal was against the run of play and Argentina was both a little unlucky and a little defensively lazy on the goal and the action leading up to it.

The fundamental problem, which so few professional managers understand, is that the cost of the mentality shift is seldom worth the benefit from having more men in the box. This is especially true when trying to defend against a team with at least five players capable of scoring outside the box and several excellent crossers. Messi is rightfully being praised for his two assists, but the low crosses being repeatedly whipped in from the right side by #4, I think it was, were simply lethal. Frankly, I thought England did extremely well to avoid committing any fouls and giving up any penalties in the last 20 minutes.

Anyhow, we’ll discuss more on tonight’s Darkstream, which will be devoted to discussing a) the World Cup, b) the upcoming AI campaign, and c) possibly a new song.

UPDATE: Before anyone complains about Argentina playing rough, I checked it out in slow motion and Jude Bellingham should definitely been called for a penalty for this foul against Messi. He literally put an arm around him, drove his shoulder into him, and knocked him down in the box without ever touching the ball.

DISCUSS ON SG

Spain definitely kicked it up a gear. That’s the way possession football should be played, using the ball to attack relentlessly rather than having the defenders passing it around. Spain took risks, but they had the speed, the fitness, and the technical skill to do so. It was probably the best game of this Mondiale to date.

DISCUSS ON SG

I think England deserved to win the game. They were the better team. And I don’t think the disallowed goal on the corner was a problem, nor do I think there was an issue on the build-up to the England goal where the ball may or may not have touched a TV drone wire or whatever. That being said:

Harry Kane and Jed Spence should have both received yellow cards for simulation. And it was definitely not a penalty; Spence stuck his leg out to draw contact, then threw himself down. Now, to be clear, I have despised Harry Kane for years and consider him to be a blight on the beautiful game. About 75 percent of his game involves falling down and appealing for a free kick or penalty; you can see him literally lifting up his legs and diving every time he imagines he was touched. Sometimes he even points his toes. He’s the anti-Haaland and the biggest cheat in international football since Pippo Inzaghi was going down like he was shot in the back of the head against Turkey. So I thought it was hilarious that Norway scored its first goal in part because Kane was too busy diving instead of putting pressure on the guy who stole the ball and preventing him from sending the cross that turned into an inadvertent shot and goal.

Norway should have gotten a penalty on a later corner kick, the one that bounced around, hit the crossbar, and nearly went in. After it hit the crossbar, a Norwegian player went up to head it in and took a forearm shiv to the back of the neck from the defender behind him that knocked him down. That wasn’t just a foul and a penalty, it was an obvious yellow card. Any statistical analysis will show that about 99 percent of the fouls called on corners are called on the attacking team, which is totally absurd. And yet, the same VAR review that correctly disallowed Norway’s goal for Haaland’s push did nothing when a defender threw a Muy Thai elbow strike.

Jude Bellingham was great. It’s amazing that despite all the skill, talent, and money, the guy scores because he follows his teammate’s shots just like every schoolboy player is taught, unlike every other player on both teams.

Norway’s right wing needs a shock collar. He repeatedly refused to pass the ball to Haaland in scoring opportunities. There’s no excuse for that when Haaland is literally the team’s entire offense. If he makes those three passes in the first half, Norway very likely would have won the game.

DISCUSS ON SG

That was some impressively bad defense over the last two days, first by Brazil, then the USA.

Gabriel is not capable of going toe-to-toe with Erling Halland physically. He knows this from their Premier League battles. He just got overpowered on Halland’s first goal.

Both Gabriel and the other Brazilian were a little lazy on Halland’s second goal. He was obviously going to shoot, but he wasn’t far enough out for them to be content with that. Gabriel just waited in the box and the other defender didn’t go down to one knee to block the shot, which is what allowed Halland to put it right through his legs. But you have to commit to blocking the shot at that range, especially when you’ve got a man behind you for support in case it’s a fake and he is going to break into the box.

I only saw the first half of the USA-Belgium game, but Tim Ream was terrible. Not only did he stand around and watch the Belgian forward score the first goal, but he jumped too early and took himself out of position for the second one. And every time he had the ball, he’d hold it too long, then pass it backwards.

I really don’t understand these coaches who just love passing the ball backwards and are content with one single shot per half. Do they understand that you don’t get any points for possession? The primary correlation with winning in soccer is shots on target, not time of possession. Anything you’re doing that reduces shots on target is reducing your chance of winning. The USA had 56% possession, lost the shots on target contest 7-2, and lost 4-1.

DISCUSS ON SG

Before the game started, I pointed out Vinicius to Spacebunny and told her there was a very good chance that he would score a hat trick against Scotland. We’re 20 minutes in, he already has two goals, and Brazil hasn’t had to work for either of them.

The Scots look like a poorly-coached children’s team that hasn’t been taught not to dribble at the back.

UPDATE: FIFA is trying to prevent Brazil from running away with the game and disallowed the goal on the basis of a phantom foul that only VAR could detect but doesn’t show up on the replays.

Ridiculous. I was sympathetic to the Scots prior to that. Now I hope Brazil drops 10 on them.

Nice to see Switzerland go through, although Rodriguez looks beyond cooked to me and their defense has real problems with defending set pieces and long crosses. Nice unselfish play up front from Embolo with the assist on the second goal.

UPDATE: And I would have been correct about that hat trick before the end of the first half without that absurdly disallowed goal. And once again, Scotland couldn’t either a) clear the ball or b) mark the triggerman. 2-0 courtesy of Vinicius’s second. And it would have been 4-0 if the Scottish keeper hadn’t made a brilliant save right before the end of the half.

The problem is pretty clear. Scotland’s manager is having his team play an inappropriate system for the situation. They’re just not good enough to play ball control against Brazil.

DISCUSS ON SG

Lionel Messi has become the leading goalscorer in World Cup history after netting his 17th goal in the competition to open Monday’s meeting with Austria. Messi became the first player in history to feature at six World Cups earlier this summer—later joined at that tally by Cristiano Ronaldo—having played at every tournament since his first in 2006.

Messi downplayed the significance of the record in the aftermath of the Algeria game, insisting it was “just a statistic, nothing more,” while simultaneously acknowledging the importance of sitting in the same bracket as Klose, Ronaldo and Gerd Müller.

Alongside breaking the scoring record, Messi also became the first player in tournament history to score in six consecutive World Cup games, having netted five across four knockout games all the way back in 2022.

I was, for a long time, an advocate of Pele as having been the greatest soccer player of all time. Now, in my defense, this was in 2020, when Messi had yet to win either a World Cup or a Copa America, so there was legitimately a rather glaring gap in his resume, even in comparison with his own fellow Argentine, Diego Maradona, much less Pele. Yes, football is a team sport, but it’s not as if Argentina was a non-competitive team prior to 2020 or that Messi was being forced to carry them singlehandedly.

But in an effort to prove my case for Pele, I went to the statistics. And there I was astounded to discover that not only did Messi rank as one of the top scorers of all time, he also ranked as a top ten assist-provider as well. In fact, statistically, at that time he was essentially the equivalent of BOTH Cristiano Ronaldo AND Zinedine Zidane every single time he walked on the field.

To put this in American football terms, it would be equivalent to Peyton Manning leading the NFL in passing yards and rushing yards, not only for a season, but over his whole career. It’s unthinkable. How do you both a) score more than everyone else and b) help others score more than anyone else? Even Michael Jordan never led the NBA in both scoring and assists. The only real comparison is to Wayne Gretzky, which tends to underline the Messi’s case.

And this was BEFORE he added two Copa America championships and a World Cup championship. And he’s now scored 5 goals in the first two games of the current World Cup Finals with football powerhouse Jordan next on the schedule. At this point, I won’t be surprised if Argentina wins the championship and Messi wins the Golden Boot.

Anyhow, I just thought I should acknowledge that while I have been wrong about things in the past, and I will be wrong about things in the future, I have never, ever, been more wrong than I was when I argued, sincerely, that Messi was not the greatest of all time.

DISCUSS ON SG