[Football] FIFA World Cup 2010 South Africa

Luckyazn · Jun 18, 2010

WTF is England doin

Stack24 · Jun 18, 2010

Luckyazn said:

WTF is England doin
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Playing like utter crap.

ChrisBosh · Jun 18, 2010

fredv said:

You know nothing about football man, Zero, zip, nada, NOTHING.

I've played football since I was 5, aka for 15 years and i've seen everything, and screaming at the ref happens every game.

oh and btw, viva Mexico?
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LOL, you know nothing about me and neither do I know anything about you. Stop spewing anecdotal evidence cause it doesn't mean ****!!! Nada, none, zero, NOTHING! Players do not go shouting at refs after a match is over, if it has happened before its been rare, my only point was that is not good sportsmanship.

fredv said:

I am sorry, I missed the point where an actual GOAL WAS TAKEN AWAY ....from Slovenia

Oh, wait, you are mixing situations of lessor gravity.

Big shocker !!

DD
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Hey DD I'm not saying the goal was not good, cause it was, the goal should have counted, that's not what my point was. Anyway this is not anything to argue over as my point was just an opinion. I was also just annoyed with the general acting throughout this world cup, wrong time to express those feelings I guess

geeimsobored · Jun 18, 2010

Luckyazn said:

WTF is England doin
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I hope they keep it up :grin:

geeimsobored · Jun 18, 2010

weslinder said:

So I just skipped out of work and watched hightlights for the first time, and I have to ask: Is the Slovenia nickname the "Charlie Browns"?
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My sister called me mid-game and mentioned that. It's a pretty uncanny resemblance.

RocketForever · Jun 18, 2010

DaDakota said:

Make sure he doesn't referee another WC match for one....

DD
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It's really lame to call a foul in that situation. Watch the replay. There are like 7 individual wrestling matches going on inside the box after Donovan sent the ball in. The ref could have easily called a foul on everyone. Just let them play. By the way, some of the comments on youtube and yahoo are just saddening. Why some people could say such nasty racist and hatred stuffs because of a sport match is beyond me.

rhadamanthus · Jun 18, 2010

Great article by Joe Posnanski...

This is going to be about U.S.-Slovenia… but let’s start with baseball for a moment. I know a woman who grew up in England and came to live in America 20 or so years ago. She was fascinated by this “baseball” thing that she heard her friends talking about. She was not an especially big sports fan at the time, but she wanted to experience all that our great land has to offer, and so of course she wanted to see baseball and see why people seemed to like it so much.

She had moved to Texas, so she went to Arlington Stadium on a nice May day. She tried to take it all in. The grass was lovely. The fans were loud. The place smelled of popcorn and beer. The rules were confusing to her, but her friends told her to not worry so much about the rules. The pitcher throws the ball. The batter tries to hit it. The fielders try to catch it. Just take in the whole experience. So, that’s what she tried to do. And, they told her, keep watching the guy on the mound, because he’s one of the greatest pitchers to ever play the game.

“But he looks so old,” she said.

He was old — 44 at the time. Still, she watched him. He did seem to throw the ball hard. And, as the game went along, she noticed this excitement building up. Her friends tried to explain after four innings, five innings, that the man on the mound had not given up a hit. They tried to explain to her that if he kept it going, it would be called a “no-hitter,” and this was a rare thing.

The no-hitter went six innings, then seven, and still the pitcher did not give up a hit, and her friends now tried to explain the history of the moment. A no-hitter is special enough, but this was even more special because that pitcher had already thrown SIX no-hitters — more than any pitcher ever. In the eighth inning, with the crowd in a frenzy, the pitcher struck out the last two batters to keep the no-hitter going. My friend was enthralled.

As the pitcher walked to the mound in the ninth, the crowd was on the edge of lunacy, and my friend realized that she was in the middle of a great American moment. The pitcher was Nolan Ryan, of course. The date was May 1, 1991. And my friend’s first baseball game turned out to be Ryan’s seventh no-hitter. She was not entirely sure what she saw that day — and certainly did not fully absorb the enormity of the moment. But she has been a baseball fan ever since.

I thought about her on Friday morning as I watched the United States soccer team put together one of the most remarkable comebacks in the history of the World Cup. I thought about her and all those people in America who were watching world class soccer more or less for the first time.

And I was thinking just what an overmatched referee named Koman Coulibaly cost us all.

Understand: This was Nolan Ryan’s seventh no-hitter. This was Jerry West’s 60-foot shot. This was Montana to Clark in the end zone. This was Bobby Orr’s flying goal. This was the young Tiger Woods at Augusta. This was all those things multiplied several times, because this was happening on the giant stage, in the world’s biggest sporting event. A team does not come back from a 2-0 halftime deficit to win in the World Cup. It doesn’t happen. It had NEVER happened. In soccer at the World Cup level — with its impossible mix of passion and fury and consequence and vuvuzelas — each goal is a minor miracle. Two goals is basically insurmountable, especially when a team has shut you out for an entire half.

Slovenia dominated a shaken U.S. team for an entire half. The American players looked tentative… frightened, even. It was hard for a half to believe that America was the favorite coming in. In basketball, coaches talk a lot about those 50-50 balls — the loose balls or rebounds that could go to either team. These 50-50 balls are at the core of soccer, at the heart of winning. And Slovenia was getting to all of them.

Then came the second half… and a Landon Donovan goal for the ages. He dribbled toward the net at a sharp angle and when he got close he rifled a shot at about a 75-degree angle — not quite straight up, but close enough. The ball smacked into the top of the net — the first clean American goal of the World Cup. And that was the goal that changed the complexion of the match. The U.S. intensity level jumped up even higher. Of course, intensity does not make goals — world class goals still need a combination of timing and skill and luck and something wordless. But the U.S. team just kept playing at this spectacular level. It would take another 34 minutes of that before Michael Bradley, the coach’s son, raced into the box after Jozy Altidore’s header and deflected the ball into net for what soccer fans like to call “the equalizer.” I tend to think that we should try to fit “the equalizer” into our baseball lexicon as well — it’s just better than “tying run.”

Getting the tie was something close to miraculous. But, of course, you know by now that this game should not have ended in a tie. Because four minutes later, Donovan’s free kick was cracked into the goal by teammate Maurice Edu, a beautiful play that should have given the United States a 3-2 lead… and, surely, a 3-2 victory. This comeback would have been the greatest achievement in American soccer since America’s famous 1950 victory over England. And, in many ways, it would have been even better because, frankly, there was a whole lot of fluke in the 1950 victory. That was a generally weak team (the U.S. would be outscored 8-3 in its final two games) playing way over its head for one day.

There was no fluke in this comeback. The United States team, facing all those sports death clichés — back against the wall, everything to lose, on the brink — played a magnificent half of soccer and had done something transcendent. Yes, this was Nolan Ryan’s seventh no-hitter… you didn’t have to know soccer, appreciate soccer, understand soccer or even like soccer to be in the moment.

Only the winning goal was disallowed by Koman Coulibaly. And nobody knew why. Nobody. They showed the replay on television again and again… there was clearly no offside on the play. There was no foul — and if there was any foul it had to be on Slovenia. There was nothing to call. There was nothing but a brilliant goal. But the brilliant goal was disallowed anyway. Donovan would say after the game that the players asked Coulibaly for the simplest thing: Just tell them the call. Just tell them WHY he had disallowed the goal. Donovan would say that Coulibaly refused.

When you are watching a sport that you don’t often watch, things happen that you don’t quite understand. Why didn’t that play count? Oh, the offensive lineman was holding. Why was that basket disallowed? Oh, that guy was standing in the lane for three seconds. Why was that home run taken away? Oh, the umpire said it went foul. This happens in every sport.

But what made Coulibali’s Call-of-Folly so maddening is that even soccer experts could not tell us why it happened. Even an honest bad call — even Jim Joyce’s imperfect game call, for instance — is something digestible. He thought the guy was safe. OK. But this… what did he see? What mistake was made? Can a referee simply disallow a goal for fuzzy reasons that only he seems to know?

The world has grown used to the foggy quirks of soccer — extra time, diving, stretchers for players who immediately run back out on the pitch, calls made without explanation. But most of us are not used to these things. And, for so many, this was a lousy introduction to soccer’s whims.

In the end, the draw gives the United States an excellent chance of advancing to the knockout round. If the U.S. beats Algeria, it probably will move on. But a victory would have given the U.S. an excellent chance to win the group. And a victory would have given a lot of people all across the country a moment to remember… and a story to tell when people asked, “So, when did you become a soccer fan?”

Instead, it will baffle a lot of people who wanted something to remember. And it will give a lot of people who didn’t like soccer in the first place a chance to say: “What the heck was that?”
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Agent94 · Jun 18, 2010

England is starting to come hard now. 10 more minutes!

AroundTheWorld · Jun 18, 2010

England sucks so bad, I just wish Algeria were a little more dangerous, they don't dare to push into the box.

SwoLy-D · Jun 18, 2010

Agent94 said:

England is starting to come hard now. 10 more minutes!
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That's what SHE said.

ENGLAND. FRANCE. ITALY. SPAIN. GERMANY.

Meh, I didn't want to wait until the 90th minute.

AroundTheWorld · Jun 18, 2010

Mathloom said:

That picture is bs lol.

IIRC, that picture is before the foul whistle but after the action which caused the foul call.

Although I totally agree that at the point of the picture, all the Slovenians are fouling all the US players... but just before it a US player was moving forward and placed his hand/arm of the Slovenian defender and pushed him.

I'm not even sure the push demanded a foul.

I'm not saying it was not a mistake.

I'm just saying that the picture doesn't tell the whole story.

Tough luck. I was rooting for the US, but in football, the best teams stop whining after the whistle, pick up their balls and try to win the rest of the game or the next game.

Then again, I understand because I would be gutted too if it were my team. At least there's still a great chance.
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Why do you always have to be wrong on any topic and always use like 200,000 words to express your wrong opinion?

DonnyMost · Jun 18, 2010

The only reason England gave David Beckham a job on the bench is to raise the team average from "fugly" to "buttugly".

Cannonball · Jun 18, 2010

Great outcome for the US. If they can beat Algeria, they're moving on.

weslinder · Jun 18, 2010

I would enjoy England's ineptness (ineptitude?) in this game a lot more if the Algerians weren't flopping and diving like they were a French colony.

stipendlax · Jun 18, 2010

England blew it. Wow.

Now, we control our own destiny. We win against Algeria and we're in.

DonnyMost · Jun 18, 2010

Perfect ending for the US. Love this. Wednesday is gonna be awesome.

geeimsobored · Jun 18, 2010

England choking as usual. :grin:

weslinder · Jun 18, 2010

So now it's win-and-in for the US, right?

DaDakota · Jun 18, 2010

This makes the USA's screw job even worse.

But both the USA and UK control their destiny, both of them win and they are in.

DD

AroundTheWorld · Jun 18, 2010

Let me just say England has one point less than Germany after 2 games.

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