2018 World Cup running thread

The brackets are so out of balance. You have to think England or Croatia come out of the weak side. But then the stacked side—Brazil, Belgium, France, even Uruguay... I'm not as high on Brazil as some, mostly because I fucking hate Neymar, but that's a heavy road.

 

IMO Willian was man of the match. His speed broke down the Mexico defense in the second half and they were never able to recover their balance.

 

DOS A CERO, POR SIEMPRE Y PARA SIEMPRE

 

Yup. As the parent of a soccer goalie, he’s been in a few shootouts. Loves it. All house money.

 

It's also a position that involves long periods of inaction. A shootout is pretty much the polar opposite of that.

 

I’ll push back with this.

He loves being a goalkeeper because it is almost all action. It’s him yelling to his defenders constantly on positioning for corners, advances, free kicks, etc.

It’s why he quit baseball... too much inaction, standing around getting skin cancer while playing first base.

 

Well fuck, how can I argue with cancer?

That’s a valid point. I’ll amend to “direct action.”

 

Lots of hero potential as a soccer keeper.

Unless you let the ball in through your hands or you let a rebound turn into a second shot... when you get hot, you become a hero.

Some of his best sports memories are from this spring where he tossed shutouts with 11 or 12 saves or even a 1-1 draw against better opponents.

 

Wouldn't it be better to reseed? They've added teams and they have penalty kicks, which they didn't used to have.

 

I don't know how you would actually reseed the teams. There would be lots of tiebreakers.

Something that might be interesting? If you could rank the teams, you let the first-place team pick its opponent from the other 15. Second-place picks next and so on. The strategy and insult would be pretty fucking intense, and it would mean there was no such thing as a meaningless group game.

 

The problem is teams aren't really seeded in the first place. The groups are a mess as it is in many ways. You could have some committee seed 1 through 16 after group, but they'd have to do it fast, or you could just do it on FIFA rankings, but who knows what good way there is to do it. Also with the way the schedule is set up, reseeding doesn't totally work because you potentially could have a team that needs to play two days after they finished group. If you seeded groups it may be different. None of it is impossible, they'd just have to do some thinking to figure it out and that's not exactly a FIFA strongsuit is it? I don't mind a set bracket, especially with the "randomness" of the group draws, but I get the thought.

 

Why would that be? they can play the 8 matches in any order.