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

Pleasantly surprised that the ref didn’t call a cheesy penalty late.

Survive and advance!

 

Fuck yeah!

 

We gave up the midfield with the Acosta, Zimmerman and Moore subs, plus taking off Sargent, who does a lot of work coming back to help. (I acknowledge we needed Zimmerman in the air.) We were bound to lose control.

I hope we've seen the last of Shaq Moore in this tournament.

 

We'll-Play-aFourth!

We'll-Play-aFourth!

We'll-Play-aFourth!

The chant of mediocrity

 

Pulisic to the hospital for tests.

 

oof

bad news

 

I see a diagnosis of testicular torsion in Christian's future.

 

USA-Colombia 1994 comes to mind.

 

Finally revenge for the hostage crisis.

 

WHEW. The worst thing about this was I had a 2 p.m. meeting that was not going anywhere, but I take most of these meetings via Zoom so I don't have to use my inside voice. It's an all-editors planning thing, and toward the end I get a DM from the publisher: "What do you think about seven minutes?" I replied, "Whatever do you mean?" It ended just at the start of injury time.

That said, I don't think I saw anything today I wasn't expecting. Pulisic showed up and might have given a spleen or a testicle to the cause. I'm still not wild about the tactics or the substitutions, but the guys who were supposed to be good have basically been good. Not great, but good. We've seen positive flashes from Dest, Musah, McKennie, and were pretty decent at the back. Seemed like Jedi Robinson was all over the place down the left today, at least in the first half.

They showed up, they were the better side and we'll see how things go against the Dutch. A good day.

 

Might be time for a World Cup of a different sort.

 

Iran was very productive down their left. Surprised that Musah wasn’t pulled for Gio because he was gassed but I guess 5 at the back barely worked. Both Shaq and Haji were ineffective.