No Irish, No Yanks, No Clogs - FIFA World Cup 2018

that’s some odious defending by the swedes.

That’s spectacular.

That was the stupidest fucking free kick any stupid fuck ever fucking conceded

Inevitable but can't begrudge such a fantastic goal

this germany team are mb the most entertaining thing in this wc

Crime of the fucking century.

kon tiki man to be eaten by sharks imo

Fucking wasteman hipster fucking twat

gutted for Olsen

I hope Mexico wreck the fuckers now

^^^^^^^

and Korea beat Germany 3-0 to go through :)

Can see Sweden beating Mexico tbh.

The bandwagon hipsters are in full force now in my neighbourhood. They love Berlin and they love the Mannschaft and it's an atrocious sight and please make them go away.

the german defence will def suit son a lot more than mexico's or sweden's

god I don't know what could be better than sonaldo putting germany out the wc

yeah i'm signing up for that

Also the freaking commentators always straddling the lines of cultural clichés about the german spirit and mental toughness is really just the worst. You would never hear them say that about Nigeria or Costa Rica.

otoh Germany always seems to be able to pull this off, and I've never seen Costa Rica do it. (of course, it's a little easy to do 'it' if you're the biggest and richest football nation in the world)

Sweden basically played like a UEFA Cup level Premiership team in 1993 but that was both devastating and stupid.

The sheer gall of scoring one of the best ever World Cup goals when you're seconds away from elimination as well.

C’mon it was a fine piece of trickery but it wasn’t Bergkamp 1998 or Carlos Alberto 1970. There’s been better goals in this tournament already.

Context matters...

If Germany wasn't the most or second most powerful footballing nation in the world for 50 years running vs a winter country with 1/8th of their population I would agree, but you are right, context matters.

in the context of football of yore when goals when enjoyed RT or shortly after, context was v important, but in the context of modern football enjoyed through compilations and parochial hard house, context is less important

I knew I'd seen Toni Kroos' goal before. What a player, Román, always knew just how to stick it to Racing 😢 pic.twitter.com/4wxym9h5fm

— Daniel Edwards 💚 (@DanEdwardsGoal) June 23, 2018

Had a bet on Sweden ahead at half time but Germany winning so TY based Kroos

Lol yeah I had over 2.5 goals

Can Kroos do it in big games y/n

nice to see the Serbian FA responding to defeat with calm equanimity

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/jun/24/world-cup-low-goals-count-financial-inequality-lack-of-time

Bunkering!

i dispute the opening sentence of his article so i'm not slogging thru the rest of it

i assume he wrote it before yesterday's games tho

wtf this has been a good world cup

kroos goal keeper error

(xp) otm

i really like Inverting the Pyramid so i assume this is just clickbait Graun mode strictly for the bucks

god help me i'm going to the pub to watch this one, i feel it needs the reportage

lol @ That Guardian article

Of more progressive football there has been little at this tournament, with the one side that promised something new, Argentina, never quite embracing the 2-3-3-2 blueprint of Jorge Sampaoli and collapsing into anarchy as they tried to operate a back three against Croatia.

more like 1-10 (Messi > give the ball to Messi players)

He does make a valid point about the European dominance, which gets more annyoing every World Cup.

no it doesn't

England still going for three at the back with Walker.

Alli is out.

What's annoying about it? (xps)

That piece is hilarious, there is almost a colonial mindset to that stuff. First week can be slow because they are first games and sides don't want to lose but the last few days have been great. VAR has played a part on the penalties front - but maybe the rules and players will catch up with it in time so I expect the numbers to go down. VAR's implementation was rushed.

The dearth of goals is the obvious complaint. As of Friday night, there had been 2.33 per game. By comparison, there were 3.21 per game in the Champions League last season and 2.67 in the Premier League. The lowest average for a World Cup is the 2.21 of 1990.

What thrash is this? Its a one-month tournament played over four years. Its going to be a very different mindset.

And the world cup has never had more than 5-10 teams, all from Europe and South America, that could win the thing. The odd run from an African or Asian team doesn't change that.

And the problems from Argentina (and Germany) stem from them being at the end of their cycle. The former nearly didn't make it.

And the world cup has never had more than 5-10 teams, all from Europe and South America, that could win the thing.

One of the most annoying aspects (and less than 10 imo). Not sure why anyone would deny that. Article is bad tho sure.

Not really sure why a tactics nerd is worried about the goal count. I say this as a tactics nerd.

Yeah its less than 10.

There isn't really an European dominance of the WC - or no more so than usual. Usually one of Brazil/Argentina/Uruguay get to the latter stages. One of Colombia or Chile threaten to do something. The former were hacked around four years ago.

Croatia (I forgot the odd contribution from Central and Eastern Europe) and Senegal have played some good stuff this time around and hopefully they can get to the latter stages (really hoping Senegal put Eng out). That's par for the course.

xp = maybe more sides should go for it like Tunisia did yesterday and get mauled.

European sides doing better at this one than the two previous: at both of those two, only 6 uefa teams got to second round, it'll be at least 9 or 10 this time you'd think

he's mostly talking about world cup football in general so it's not griping but an attempt to explain the general, long term lower goal count compared to say the champions league which has a v similar format. it's imo not immediately obvious why there wld be such a consistent disparity

I do think the point abt world football getting more rather than less unequal is interesting. it's not so much abt complaining abt the poor spectacle as using the WC as a measure of the health of world football which is largely out of FIFA's control

One of the most annoying aspects (and less than 10 imo). Not sure why anyone would deny that. Article is bad tho sure.

This doesn't annoy me tbh.

I hope Loftus-Cheek isn't playing too high up the pitch on this occasion, might be interesting to see him dropping a bit deeper, picking the ball from Henderson and running with it. England struggled against Tunisia because they didn't have any midfielders who were really capable of moving the ball quickly under pressure (Alli can but he was clearly injured) and playing RLC in a kind of quasi-Dembele role might help mitigate that. If nothing else he's very difficult to knock off the ball.