The Soccer Thread (Version 13) — Winter World Cup Edition

I usually agree with you on the announcer bashing, but I liked Donovan today in Mexico- Poland. By midway through the second half, he was rightly calling out the dreck on the field as dreck. I still feel that too many soccer announcers still try to sell an ass game as something more.

Mexico-Poland was an ass game.

 

Was Ian the one who called out “the quaintly-named Stadium 974?” I lost it laughing.

 

A lot of these games are going to be ass because the national teams didn't have the usual run-up of practice together heading into this. Pretty much every domestic league in Europe played until the week before the opening game. Add in some key injuries (Sadio Mane for Senegal, for instance), and it's going to take a couple of games for teams to look right. Unfortunately, in this format, you don't really have a couple of games to look right, so there might be more chaos than usual in the group stage.

 

He was good; he needs to be better.

https://www.theringer.com/world-cup/2022/11/22/23473644/usmnt-world-cup-2022-christian-pulisic

 

Man, I thought we were getting a lot of stoppage.

FIFA orders World Cup referees to add time at end of games

 

What teams like Italy men and English women did at the last Euros made this a good move. In 5 years, it’s going to be two 30 minute halves of live ball only clocks.

 

Meanwhile, FS1 has Chad Ochocinco as part of its studio show, for some damn reason. He’s presenting “Ocho’s Cinco” top 5 plays of the day and, rather than showing us the day’s best plays, it seems to be a segment-long joke about how badly he can say the names of international players. ‍Ugh.

 

You know them black fellas can't pronounce nuthin'.

 

Budweiser to Ship Unsold Beer to Nation That Wins Qatar World Cup (msn.com)

 

Gianluca Pagliuca ... turned into a catchphrase for Keith and Dan during the halcyon SportsCenter days. "Gianluca Pagliuca, Gianluca Pagliuca, Gianluca Pagliuca ... "

Probably wanted to make Gary Miller urinate out of an upstairs window.

 

So this is the Pam Ward game of the first set of games.