“The debate about the implementation of the various technologies in football such as the Hawkeye system used in tennis to determine whether the tennis ball falls into or outside of the court has been raging for quite some-time. It has died down in recent times due to the persistent unwillingness of FIFA, the world’s football governing body to implement such technologies in football.” (Beopedia)
“The French have a history of doing revolutionary things, and Laurent Blanc’s decision not to call up any of the players that were on ‘the bus of shame’ when les Bleus refused to train at the World Cup is almost up there with lopping the head off Louis XVI. It was the hapless king’s dilettante wife, Marie Antoinette, who declared, ‘Let them eat cake’, and it seems Blanc has taken a leaf out of the Queen’s book with a devil-may-care ditching of every single player who rebelled in South Africa.” (ESPN)
“Judy Garland’s Dorothy followed the yellow brick road to Kansas; Manchester United believe their path to play the city’s Wizards tomorrow is paved with gold. Whether it is the ideal preparation for a 10-month English season remains to be seen. Last weekend United played in Toronto. Next weekend they play in Guadalajara. Besides Canada, Mexico and the American Midwest they will have also fitted in matches in Philadelphia and Houston before returning to England, via a game in Ireland, for the Community Shield.” (Independent)
“One of the perceived anomalies in European club football is the presence of the six Welsh clubs in the English league system. What a lot of people don’t realise, however, is that historically the Football League was the pinnacle of a system that encompassed both England and Wales, and that prior to the launch of the Football Conference in 1979, Welsh football clubs mainly competed in regional leagues that were the pinnacle of non-league football in England and Wales.” (twohundredpercent)
“Alive & Kicking balls are hand stitched out of local leather. They are tougher than imported synthetic balls, last far longer on rough ground and therefore give children in Africa lasting fun. Every ball carries a message about HIV/AIDS and malaria which can be used by teachers and sports coaches to broach discussions with children on deadly disease.” (Alive and Kicking)
“Roy Hodgson arrived at Fulham in 2007 without much fanfare. He was regarded, probably largely because of an unhappy spell at Blackburn Rovers, as a mediocre manager who’d had reasonable success abroad with a string of mid-ranked countries — Finland, Switzerland, Sweden — but who couldn’t really cut it at the highest level. His two years of rebuilding work at Internazionale in the 1990s, in which the Italian club finished seventh and third and reached the final of the UEFA Cup, was broadly ignored.” (SI)
“So it’s come to this, a once-great European side reduced to selling their best players and bringing in a crocked creative midfielder? This isn’t going to be Inter Milan’s best year. Wait, that was last year, it’s Liverpool this time. When it comes to Liverpool you’re guaranteed two things; Drama and impassioned fans. Impassioned often about complete polar opposites (‘Benitez out’ Vs ‘In Rafa we trust’, ‘Joe Cole is the key’ Vs ‘Joe Cole is a crock’) and football is about these divisive issues. The thing about the beautiful game is that you never know what’s going to happen, however I’m still going to try to predict it.” (EPL Talk)
“‘This can kick-start English football and it would, over time, move us forward with a huge leap. That would not, obviously, happen immediately, but given two or three years it would start making a clear difference.’ So says Howard Wilkinson, architect of the original plan for The Football Association to build a National Football Centre at Burton-on-Trent.” (Pitch Invasion)
Dunga
“A Brazilian tech company doctored these transformations for our amusement. Something which may be very simple but to the technologically unevolved (present!) still stands in the end as wonderfully cool. At least in the case of Dunga. Diego’s (below), however, is artistic metaphor. Someone whose transformations have run the full spectrum of one human’s physical appearance capabilities; almost as though he suffered through a drug problem somewhere in the middle. A man aptly summed in roughly 30 seconds, with not a single word to be found.” (World Cup Blog)
“You thought football had stopped for a month, didn’t you? Well, not in the Russian Premier League, which has restarted after a brief break over the World Cup. This match between Spartak and Rubin is something of a glamour tie – 2nd v 1st from last season, and these two clubs have therefore both qualified for the group stages of the 2010/11 Champions League.” (Zonal Marking)
“Ask your average football fan the one thing they would like to see changed about the game, and the majority will reply with the word ‘technology’. There is no doubt that following the infamous Frank Lampard goal that never was in World Cup 2010 that something needs to be done to avoid such injustices occurring again, and that’s something we absolutely need to work on.” (Goal)
Offside (association football)
“It’s a couple of months old now, but my attention was recently directed to this article by The Guardian’s Jonathan Wilson, eulogising the current offside law, or more to the point the current interpretation of it. Before I get down to the serious business of slagging it off let me acknowledge: it’s an interesting article, and most of Wilson’s historical analysis is probably fair. In particular, I agree with him on the benefit of the changes in the mid-90s when the interpretation of “interfering with play” was relaxed. These changes addressed that part of the issue to most peoples’ satisfaction, as well as stressing that benefit of the doubt should go to attackers, but still failed to relieve all the frustration that all football fans have with offside decisions much of the time. Wilson is right in noting that something further was required, but goes badly wrong in his analysis of what the actual problem was and thus ends up applauding a cackhanded solution.” (twohundredpercent)
The Question: Why is the modern offside law a work of genius?
“Nothing in football is so traduced as the offside law. Most seem to regard it as a piece of killjoy legislation, designed almost to prevent football producing too many goals and being too much fun, while for the punditocracy it has become the universal scapegoat, the thing that ‘nobody understands’. Just because Garth Crooks doesn’t get something, though, doesn’t make it a bad thing. The modern offside law may be the best thing that’s ever happened to football, and it is almost certainly the reason Barcelona have been so successful with a fleet of players whose obvious asset is their technique rather than their physique.” (Guardian – 13 April 2010 )
“The Ball says final goodbyes to friends made in Bamako as it heads off the beaten track ou route to Burkina Faso. This EP we have a great song from Mamou Sidibé and her new release on Akwaaba Music with “Mary” find the album on iTunes. ; Check it.” (Blip)
Mario Balotelli“If you are wondering what the fuss is all about over Mario Balotelli, you probably have not been paying too much attention to Italian soccer in the past three seasons. Despite being left out – no, make that ignored – by Marcello Lippi for the World Cup, Balotelli is probably Italy’s most exciting young talent at the moment and a certain member of new Azzurri coach Cesare Prandelli’s squads for the upcoming Euro 2012 qualifiers.” (ESPN)
“So in today’s news, one of the biggest transfer deals of a hitherto quite quiet summer has taken place. Joe Cole has signed for Liverpool. Cole signs on a free transfer after his release from Chelsea in June, a parting of the ways that Cole described as ‘political’ in nature rather than for any particular footballing reasons. As is increasingly becoming the case these days, Twitter has proved an interesting source for news, opinion and information on Cole’s move to Anfield.” (Just Football)
“Now that you know what Martin Samuel and Alan Shearer think, you might not be interested in any more expert views on the recently-finished World Cup. But amid the small print on the ‘past World Cups’ page of FIFA’s website is a link to a series of documents which provide a more fascinating insight into past tournaments than the title ‘Technical Study Group Report’ suggests. These reports were first commissioned after the 1966 finals in England, when national team coaches from the 16 finalists were interviewed to gauge their views on competition preparation and tactics.” (twohundredpercent)
Bacchanal the Andrians, Nicolas Poussin
“Football Further will be on holiday until the middle of August, during which time the site will be under-going what the French call ‘un relooking’, so apologies in advance if any visitors during that period find the blog looking like the cyber equivalent of a building site.” (Football Further)
“One prominent player agent in the Bundesliga has bought the domain mediocritysucks.de. He also loves sending out provocative letters with famous quotes from varied people — Karl Marx, Confucius and Lukas Podolski have all been featured in the past. His latest missive came this week, in a letter with a big “Steven Gerrard for England” sticker, and it carried a good line at the back of the envelope: ‘We don’t fear the competition, we are the competition.'” (SI)
“A debate is raging on the excellent Minus the Shooting regarding the dissatisfaction wrought by Spain’s performance at the World Cup so far. A lot of really interesting points are being made about the cognitive dissonance of the media’s framing of Spain and the difficulty to be excited by the virtuosity inherent in their performances.” (Vieira’s Weary One)
“It’s easy to be cynical about a book written by an American history professor which starts out describing the events of July 9, 2006. Oh shit, you think to yourself, it’s John Doyle with a doctorate; another football outsider thinking his fresh set of eyes can derive some deeper social meaning from ‘The Beautiful Game’ which the rest of us have somehow missed all these years. And there’s going to be more drivel about the head-butt. I mean, please. Spare us.” (Pitch Invasion)
“It’s Friday night, and in a ‘favela’ (shanty town) in this Brazilian city, a group of men relax with a beer after a hard week, while a song can be heard above the rowdy chatter. The lyrics, set to a samba rhythm, are about typical topics like football and women, but also about gender violence. They mingle with the smoke from an ‘asado,’ where meat is roasting over a makeshift grill on the pavement. This is Santa Marta, a favela in the south of Rio de Janeiro.” (IPS)
“I wasn’t quite as down on this World Cup as most people seem to have been, but these things are relative. I’d place it high above 2002 and just above 2006, but behind every other tournament in my lifetime, and I don’t think that’s just down to the weariness of age. For once, in fact, I seem largely to agree with what Sean Ingle says in this piece.” (Guardian)
Michael Bradley
“This is the second of a four-part Series of Report Cards for the U.S. Men’s National Team’s Four Year World Cup Cycle, 2007-2010. While we are not issuing grades for all 92 players capped by Bob Bradley during the cycle, we will feature players not on the World Cup roster who figured prominently in the run-up to the 2010 World Cup. We will issue grades of A-F, rather than player-rankings style grades of 1-10. This edition is likely the longest, focusing on the American midfielders.” (Yanks are coming)
“The World Cup has gone, but the embarrassment lingers for England and its Italian coach, Fabio Capello. The coach and his legal advisers are seeking to distance him from an online rating of players’ performances that bears his name. The Web site, the Capello Index, published last week, does not list one English player among the top 70 at the World Cup after the country was beaten 4-1 by Germany in the first knockout stage.” (NYT)
“Celtic Football Club played its first game on ‘an unusually cold evening in late May of 1888,’’ according to ‘Celtic: A Complete Record 1888-1992.’’ Celtic defeated Rangers, 5-2, beginning a rivalry that transcends sport, kicking off the history of one of the most widely-followed clubs in the world.” (Boston)
Paolo Uccello, The Battle of San Romano
“Now that the World Cup is over and the Spaniards and everyone else who admired their elegant way of playing soccer is happy, and the few nations whose teams either exceeded expectations or did okay in the month-long tournament have returned to their normal lives, the fans in underachieving countries are still fuming, many of them destined to recall for the rest of their days how their side either disgraced themselves, or were the victims of gross injustice. For those of them that have been following their national team for years, they’ve most likely already suffered more than any holy martyr in the history of the church, and yet it’s doubtful that even one of them will go to heaven, because they cursed and swore till they were blue in the face each time their team lost.” (NYR – Charles Simic)
“Giancarlo Rinaldi on how the big four in Serie A – Inter, Milan, Juventus and Roma – are preparing for the new campaign. Every pre-season is always packed with clubs getting used to new Coaches, players and tactics. Between friendly matches and training sessions there is an awful lot to be taken on board. This year, perhaps more than any other, the whole of Serie A seems to be on a crash course just to be ready for when the real hostilities begin.” (Football Italia)
“No surprise — Spain is the new No. 1 in the world rankings released by FIFA only days after the completion of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Brazil, ousted in South Africa by the Netherlands, was replaced by the Dutch as the No. 2 team in the world. The rest of the top five: Brazil, Germany and Argentina.” (NYT)
Milovan Rajevac
“Sometimes in-depth tactical analysis can overcomplicate the fairly basic job of a manager – to get the best out of his players. Here are the ten managers who did that well at this World Cup.” (Zonal Marking)
“This is the first of a four-part Series of Report Cards for the U.S. Men’s National Team’s Four Year World Cup Cycle, 2007-2010. While we are not issuing grades for all 92 players capped by Bob Bradley during the cycle, we will feature players not on the World Cup roster who either figured prominently in the run-up to the 2010 World Cup. We will issue grades of A-F, rather than player-rankings style grades of 1-10. We’ll also account for players who will surely be on the USMNT radar as they prepare to find 23 good men to travel to Brazil. We begin with goalkeepers.” (Yanks are coming)
Joe Cole
“At first glance, the signing of Joe Cole by Liverpool might seem like madness. Cole will be twenty-nine years old later on this year and has had a wretched time of it with injuries over the last year or so. He remains a player whose best position remains something of a mystery after ten years of professional football. His four year contract will be worth almost £19m, and his physical condition is, if anything, more likely to slip further rather than improve as he turns thirty. This could turn out to be wrong, but in terms of signing footballers, as in the buying and selling of all other commodities, it’s a matter of balancing probabilities.” (twohundredpercent)
Jamie Redknapp: Joe Cole was right to choose Liverpool over Tottenham and Arsenal
“Joe Cole has made the right decision. Going to Anfield to play for Liverpool is the right move.
I know my dad, Harry, tried to take him to Tottenham and I can see why. He’s a clever footballer, who unlocks defences and who still has so much to offer, an old fashioned dribbler.” (Daily Mail)
For Hodgson, success won’t come easy in his step up to Liverpool
“Roy Hodgson arrived at Fulham in 2007 without much fanfare. He was regarded, probably largely because of an unhappy spell at Blackburn Rovers, as a moderate manager who’d had reasonable success abroad with a string of mid-ranked countries — Finland, Switzerland, Sweden — but who couldn’t really cut it at the highest level. His two years of rebuilding work at Internazionale in the 1990s, in which the Italian club finished seventh and third and reached the final of the UEFA Cup, was broadly ignored.” (SI)
“It is hard to envisage how formations will evolve in response to the current formational hegemony 4-2-3-1. It is an adaptable format which matches up well against other approaches. Two defensive midfielders provide a shield for the back four, which allows the full-backs to advance. The attacking midfielder has the freedom in behind the centre-forward to influence forward play without being mired in the opposition’s central defence – and they also prevent the team from being outnumbered in midfield.” (World Cup College)
“Bus rides, hair braiding, and the spirit of football go hand in hand. The Ball continues its journey through Mali this time heading out on some backtracking through more remotes parts of Mali away from Bamako.Today’s EP features music from Akwaaba Music artist Iba Diabate with ‘Dakan Tessa’ listen and download the track at Bandcamp. The second track is from Mamou Sidibe with ‘Tounge’ and you can find it on iTunes right here.” (The Ball 2010)
Cape of Good Hope
“For any practitioner of Zen who imagines he has achieved a state of detached equanimity, the ultimate test must be to watch his national side play at soccer’s World Cup. That England’s team is dull, I tell myself after the first game, I can handle; that they are truly dire, I reflect after the second and third, is perhaps only par for the course. When, in their first knockout match, England goes 2–0 down to a fluent and attractive Germany, it seems the perfect opportunity for resignation and acceptance.” (NYB)
“Spain or Barcelona? No contest. Week in, week out, Barcelona combine the midfield interplay of Xavi and Iniesta with the cutting edge of Lionel Messi, Daniel Alves and co. The comparison serves to confirm the impression that these days club football is of a much higher standard than international – as long as we restrict the debate to the major European leagues. The big clubs in Spain, England, Italy and Germany are in front of the national teams because of the time their players spend together and because they count on the best talent from all over the planet. When the World Cup stops and domestic football returns, the level of play goes up.” (BBC – Tim Vickery)
“I was born in the age of the instant replay, but only just – if it was in fact in 1970 that they started using it, as I seem to recall having heard once. I wasn’t able to confirm that, and still wonder if Hurst’s goal of 1966 was available to the television audience for immediate review, however grainily. I know for a fact the games were broadcast in black and white back then, and that it was only cinemagoers who got to see the highlight packages in colour. At any rate, the first World Cup in my actual memory is the one of 1978 and at that stage you could watch the games live – still only in black and white in our household – and the replays of the goals during the games themselves, but that was it.” (Miinus the Shooting)
“The first sign that Andres Iniesta was the danger man came midway through the second half of normal time, when he found himself through on goal (pink), but took too long to get a shot away.” (Zonal Marking)
“FIFA player of the century Pele is widely regarded as the greatest footballer of all-time. He is the all-time leading scorer of the Brazilian national football team and the only footballer to be a part of three World Cup-winning squads. In 1957 just 3 months short of his 17th birthday he made his international debut and scored. That goal making him the youngest player to score in a full international match. A year later he took the world by storm.” (Footysphere)
“Though a round-about series of unplanned events, a few weeks ago I ended up watching South Africa play France in an immense and busy fan park in a dusty working class outskirt of Pretoria/Tshwane. In the fan park, while stumbling around looking for an angle on one of the big-screens, a couple South African fans glommed onto my American friend and me with curiosity: other than some staff running the show, we seemed to be two of the few white people in the place and we obviously didn’t quite know what we were doing. So, as always seemed to happen during World Cup 2010, the locals took it upon themselves to look out for us.” (Pitch Invasion)
“This was the tournament in which many of the big names failed to perform, but few of this XI were unknowns before the tournament started. No rules about number of players per country, here’s ZM’s all-star XI.” (Zonal Marking)
“As the sound of the Vuvzelas dies away – at least until the start of South Africa’s domestic league season – many South Africans begin to get on with their normal lives. But did the tournament, which was hailed as an unprecedented success, really make things better for South Africans like the papers are saying it has? I decided to ask them.” (Not on the Wires)
“Paul Carpenter (Carpsio) takes the ‘passion and commitment’ line of England criticism in an interesting direction with an informed comparison of Agincourt to that 4-1 defeat to Germany…” (More Than Mind Games)
“On the eve of Ghana’s fateful loss to Uruguay in the quarterfinals, South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress, declared them the Black Stars of Africa. Locals joined their compatriots across the continent in willing the Black Stars on. When Uruguayan gamesmanship prevailed in the end, the disappointment seemed genuine. Even Nelson Mandela sent “a message of condolence” to Asamoah Gyan, the Ghana forward, who missed the dramatic penalty at the end of extra time. (Ghana eventually lost on penalties.)” (Social Text)
Thomas Hobbes
“WCC has noted previously that the England team appears to operate somewhat mechanistically. Even over a successful qualification campaign it seemed that Fabio Capello’s efforts had yielded mechanical rather than organic solidarity. The team was playing well together, but like an ordered collection of components rather than a smooth functioning whole. This reflects English society to a degree: this nation is closely defined by the temporal framework of a 9 to 5, Monday to Friday culture. Collectivist solutions to social problems such as the Welfare State, which were predominantly put into place in the immediate post-war era, also have something of an overarching mechanistic quality.” (World Cup College)
“With the Go-Go-USA lovefest starting to fade into the rearview mirror, we’ve reached the one time of year tough for soccer fans—the dog days of July. It’s always tougher to deal with the dog days after the excitement of a major international tournament, and nearly impossible after a World Cup. A week removed from the World Cup Final, soccer junkies from Atlanta to Australia are stuck, for the moment, in soccer Siberia. Essentially soccer’s dog days of July are similar in misery to the sporting month they reference—baseball’s ‘dog days of summer’, which are the brutal just past 100 games but not close to September stretch of the schedule played in the big leagues in late July and August, featuring frequently poorly played and error-prone games where the goal is to avoid injury and as a team try not to lose the division before you win it in September.” (Yanks are coming)
“Earlier this week, Owen Gibson of the Guardian reported that the FA were considering making a change to the FA Cup (under a banner of revitalisation for the competition) in order to help create a mid-season break, in order to the England squad. The change is one that would seismic across English football, and that change would be scrapping FA Cup replays. Even in the article itself, the suggestion is that the scrapping of FA Cup replays would only free up one midweek date, and that midweek date would be filled by a set of fixtures allowing for a two week break, or in other words, one Saturday off. However, far from revitalising the competition, it may be the beginning of the end for the world’s oldest football competition.” (twohundredpercent)
“June 3: Pride before a fall. England swan into town and the locals start dancing. They’ll soon be laughing, but for now respect fills warm air of the savannah at the Bafokeng Sports Campus outside Rustenburg. Even the king of the Bafokeng tribe turns up to greet Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard and Rio Ferdinand. The noble warrior does well to get close. England are surrounded by heavy security as they disgorge from a battle-bus emblazoned with the slogan ‘Playing With Pride And Glory’’. Someone obviously has a sense of humour. A nearby building would be better suited to hosting England — the Phokeng Trauma Centre.” (Telegraph – Henry Winter, Part 1), (Telegraph – Henry Winter, Part 2), (Telegraph – Henry Winter, Part 3)
“Two billion souls: One must begin with that. That’s how many people, or nearly so, sat or stood in view of television screens to watch twenty-two men kick a white ball around a green field on a warm July night in Berlin four years ago. The twenty-two men comprised the men’s national soccer teams of Italy and France. The occasion was the final game of the 2006 World Cup. The cagey match, as the world now knows, turned on an extraordinary event near its end when France’s captain and star, Zinedine Zidane, strode toward the Italian defender Marco Materazzi and, for reasons unknown, drove his bald pate into the taller man’s chest. The motion mimicked one he’d used a few minutes earlier to head a flighted ball inches over the Italians’ goal, coming ago nizingly close to winning the day for France. Now Zidane was expelled, his team was rattled, and a player in blue whose name few outside Umbria and Trieste recall darted inside a player in white and curled the ball inside the French goal with his left foot, cueing images, on countless flickering screens around the planet, of his countrymen celebrating Italy’s triumph in the floodlit waters of the Trevi fountain in Rome.” (Laphams Quarterly)
“I read an article this morning about how to build an audience on the internet. People on the internet, it said, don’t want a lot of fancy explanations and preambles. They just want to get in, get the information, and get out. People on the internet don’t need to know why you’re introducing something in a certain way, or where you’re thinking about going with it. They just want facts.” (Run of Play)
Andrés Iniesta
“His control of the ball, his first touch, looked just a tiny bit heavy by the exalted standards of Andrés Iniesta. The football popped up in the air and seemed to hang there, as Iniesta turned toward it with intent. Around the world we held our breath or shouted out or just waited to see if, after two hours of soccer, we would at last see a goal, and thus be spared the cheap drama of a penalty shootout to decide the destination of the World Cup trophy.” (counterpunch)
“Now that the World Cup is over (and there will be a couple more bits and pieces to tidy it up over the next couple of days), it is time to start looking forward to the new domestic season, which starts in just over four weeks, and what better way could there be to start it all off than with our annual look at the kits that the teams of 2010/11 will be wearing. As ever, it’s a mixed bag in the Premier League this season, with some clubs getting it right, some clubs getting it woefully wrong and a couple of clubs treating the launch of their new kit as if it is some sort of state secret.” (twohundredpercent)
“As the game wore on, Arjen Robben took up even more advanced and central positions when Holland had the ball. Indeed, the shot below sees Robben (green) about to race through for his one-on-one with Iker Casillas, and the Spain defence temporarily looks like a back three up against two strikers, with two man-markers and Gerard Pique (yellow) as the sweeper.” (Zonal Marking)
Vicente del Bosque
“‘Vicente del Bosque is a lovely man.’ Rarely has anyone been quite so damned with faint praise; never has a human strength been so readily and immediately presented as a professional weakness, a quality presumed to be a defect. Del Bosque is indeed a lovely man, a good man — impeccably polite, overwhelmingly decent. Loyal, humble, kindly, he is like a favorite uncle with a bushy ‘tache, a portly belly and the warmest of handshakes. But by extension, by definition, he is not much of a coach. After all, nice guys come last.” (SI)
“World Cup 2010 has been done and dusted, as we have found a champion out of the 32 teams competing for the biggest prize of all in footballing universe, Spain, as well as Thomas Muller, the winner of the Golden Boot award and also for the young German to officially announce his arrival in world football. However, there’s still one more award which drew quite a lot of criticisms and that’s the Golden Ball award, awarded to the best player in the tournament. In World Cup 2010, the winner is Uruguay’s Diego Forlan, and many pundits and fans, especially Internazionale fans out there feel that Forlan is not a deserving recipient of this award, as they feel that Wesley Sneijder, the runners-up for the award, or in other words the Silver Ball winner of this tournament who should have been the recipient of the Golden Ball.” (Beopedia)
Antonio Di Natale
“Starting with Nicolás Lodeiro back in December last year, Football Further selected 32 players to watch out for at the 2010 World Cup and then tracked their progress through the tournament via weekly scouting reports. Below is a full compilation of those reports, along with conclusions (and marks out of 10) on how each player performed.” (Football Further)
“Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll provide you with all the post-WC analysis you can handle, but for now, let’s talk about the final. As I was watching the game, I didn’t have a strong rooting interest either way, but I expected a great game. Both teams were stocked with All-Stars at virtually every position. The Spanish had won Euro; the Dutch were working on an undefeated tournament. Although the score line of a lot of the Spanish games this tournament were not as impressive as some of the other teams (Germany for example), anyone who watched a Spain game – watched the execution, understood their dominance on the ball, marveled at their ability to play ‘keep away’ after scoring a goal – knew that they were impressive. Meanwhile, the Dutch had seemingly rolled through the tournament and they managed to defeat mighty and heavily favored Brazil. This game was to be an epic showdown.” (Yanks are coming)
“As is customary after a Spain or Barcelona success, the performance of Sergio Busquets (two La Ligas, a Champions League and a World Cup after two seasons of professional football) has largely been ignored. In the World Cup final he was one of the key players for Spain – keeping Wesley Sneijder quiet, providing his usual solid, reliable passing from a deep midfield position, and dropping between his centre-backs to turn Spain’s 4-2-3-1 into something more like a 3-3-3-1 or 3-4-3 when in possession.” (Zonal Marking)
“So, yeah, the World Cup has ended. Some hated it. I enjoyed it. Of course, I took into account that no even can realistically live up to the hype as “the greatest and most entertaining” sporting event on Earth. Still, from the fluid counter-attacking Germans to the patient passing Iberians, this tournament was light years ahead of the catenaccio Italians and plodding French of 2006. Yes, Zizou was amazing in the outrounds of that tournament. No, that did not redeem the other 31 teams or other games. But enough of that, onto links and classic videos from South Africa 2010.” (futfanatico)
Joe Ledley
“Another summer in Scotland, and another period where Celtic possess the money to strengthen their squad and Rangers are forced to sell their most bankable assets. These last few days have seen a whirl of activity surrounding the Old Firm, but once again, as during the past 18 months, the main questions seem to be: where is Rangers’ money? And why is there already a sense of deflation around the reigning SPL champions?” (ESPN)
Lennon confident on Juarez
“Celtic manager Neil Lennon believes he is close to making Mexico midfielder Efrain Juarez his latest summer signing. Lennon is confident of landing Pumas UNAM starlet Juarez, 22, and hopes he could even make his Celtic debut against Manchester United while on their pre-season tour of North America.” (ESPN)
“For half an hour on Tuesday in the Champions League qualifiers, Dinamo Zagreb was worried. Davor Bubanja had given Koper the lead, and the specter of yet more European failure was raised. But then the excellent Milan Mandzukic equalized, and Miroslav Slepicka had the Croatian champion ahead. Second-half goals from Mandzukic and the two Brazilians, Sammir and Etto, gave Dinamo a 5-1 win and should have put the tie to bed.” (SI)
Scissors Kick 