| Jun 20 |
What We Learned From Brazil vs Ivory Coast (3-1)Ivory Coast Are The New Croatia It’s now well accepted that Slaven Bilic’s dive to get Lauren Blanc sent off in the 1998 semi-final was the most cynical bit of cheating in recent World Cups. However, the bit of Ivory Coast cheating to get Kaka sent off in this match has elevated cheating to a new high. Keita, who dumped himself to the floor having run into Kaka, has effectively lied to the entire planet and cheated his way into the record books. Like Croatia, let’s now hope that Ivory Coast get everything they so richly deserve and are consummately dumped out of this competition. You could argue that Keita is merely aping the floppy diving style of renowned primadonna Diveba, whose writhing on the floor is legendary, but it’s not acceptable here. Brazil Are Beginning To Turn It On, Ivory Coast Turn It Off 3 – 0 up and Brazil start to play some nice little passing things, but they were given a bit of licence in that Ivory Coast failed to play the Mourinho Discipline. You have to suspect that, like most of the African teams here, they don’t have the inclination or the managerial instruction to do this. You would have thought that a team that boasted both Toure bothers and Zakora would have the nous to be able to play a more accomplished defence (or indeed a more adventurous attack). I recall the Ivory Coast from the last World Cup and they were just a fantastic dynamic attacking side, whose progress was only impeded by being in the Group of Death with Holland and Argentina. This World Cup, in addition to giving them the kind of draw that would make you feel that FIFA is against you, has seen them become less adventurous, interesting and turned them to the dark side of football. Brazil Are Going To Explode And not just in a footballing sense. They will be a bit grumpy about Kaka’s sending off and will be pretty insistent that FIFA rescind it. In some ways it doesn’t matter, Kaka will only be suspended for one game and Brazil have all but qualified – their match against Portugal is something of a formality. But you would like to see some kind of justice done. Also it is an indication of the pressure that the refs are going to come under in the latter stages of the tournament, where grabbing and manhandling in the box are likely to be rife and every incident is going to be viewed from multiple camera angles in high definition. It will only take one really bad decision for FIFA to be getting out the video replay machines. 29 Down 35 To Go 31 Teams Remaining |
| Jun 16 |
What We Learned From Brazil vs North Korea (2-1)You’ve Got To Be Fast What with everyone and their uncle taking their cue from the Little Red Book of Mourinho and Allerdyce (2 banks of four, midfield holding player, 10 men minimum behind the ball in the final third as soon as you lose possession, blah, blah, blah), there really is only one way to break teams down. That is to own the transition between gaining possession and scoring, the incendiary moments before the opposition can get their shit together. That means you have to break fast, move fast, pass fast, confuse the opposition and score. It means pretty constant movement off the ball to show yourself to your teammates and pull the defence out of position to create openings. Think of the way Man U, Aresenal and Chelsea can break from defence to goalscoring in 5 – 10 seconds and the power, pace, accuracy and style that requires. So far no team here has shown they are capable of or even aspire to this quality of football to any significant degree. After the German’s demolition of Oztralia, this was the second best match so far. What A Goal! And when you do it right, it is awesome. For the first (only) time in the entire game we saw a Brazillian attacking the Koreans at speed and a nice direction changing pass from Elano to Maicon (second only to Robinho’s pass to Elano for the second goal). This provided the clear space for Maicon to shoot. And goals win games. Once you’re ahead, it’s a completely different match as the opposition has to chase the game and opens up their tightly maxed out defence. Now we’ve not seen many good goals so far, the killer strike of Tshabalala with the fantastic defence splitting pass setting it up being the pick of the moments to date, but this eclipsed even that. Killer strike. Kudos To The Koreans – They Have Balls Of Steel Unlike many of the low grade, whining, fouling, lazy, pig-dog ugly teams we’ve seen so far (Oztralia, Slovenia, Algeria, New Zealand, Slovakia, Denmark, Paraguay, and the whole of Group A hang your fucking heads in shame), the Koreans haven’t flinched, fouled or played the crying showpony. Nor have they simply shut up shop like some qualitiless, lower league Fat Sam Allerdyce team. Instead they defended effectively, attacked when they had the ball and never let up. If only they didn’t live in a place ruined by a fucked up, four-eyed moron and his spastic cadres, they might have a fully fledged country by now. In any other group they would have a very real chance of getting into the knock out phase. Portugal and Ivory Coast think all they need to do is beat these guys and rack up the goals. After seeing their lacklustre game earlier I think both those teams should be very, very worried. This is, indeed, the Group of Death. The next round of matches is going to be fantastic, especially Portugal vs North Korea. I can see the table reading, Brazil 6, North Korea 3, Ivory Coast 1, Portugal 1. And then it really is Game On. 14 Down 50 To Go |
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