Croatia needs a new goalie. No reaction time at all. Brazil hasn’t impressed me either.
^ +1 Mediocre at best.
was your man named Goldman Sachs? (See post 136)
The Croatian manager Niko Kovac comes across really well. “You talk about respect?”. That penalty decision was dodgy as fuck and must have been incredibly frustrating. Rakitic and Kovacic did not pull their weight.
This tournament will be the coming of age of Neymar.
So which was worse last night then the referee or the opening ceremony? Seriously, compared to the Olmpics and even previous world cups that opening ceremony was dire. It looked like they’d been given a week to put it together.
And the Croatia keeper was poor too. A top class keeper could have saved all three goals.
Saying all that, I did enjoy the game last night. Don’t want to be too negative! Spain v Holland later should be good too.
So which was worse last night then the referee or the opening ceremony? Seriously, compared to the Olmpics and even previous world cups that opening ceremony was dire. It looked like they’d been given a week to put it together.
And the Croatia keeper was poor too. A top class keeper could have saved all three goals.
Saying all that, I did enjoy the game last night. Don’t want to be too negative! Spain v Holland later should be good too.
I don’t see how brasil are ever going to beat a top side on that form. Croatia looked good but their keeper let them down. The penalty decision was terrible and the way neymar took it was ridiculous.
Spain game tonight will be tasty, they’re my pick.
all this England chat is depressing, if they win I’m voting yes in September.
Last night on the NBA Finals, one of the announcers mentioned some “home cooking” that Brazil got. I saw the penalty kick call, and I thought it was bogus. Were there any other “favors” that the ref did for Brazil?
The penalty was really a joke, but I have to take up the cudgels for the ref. These guys have to decide within secs, don´t have replays from different angles and are as much under pressure as the players. I did the job myself and know how the ref must feel now.
My apologies. I am a hockey fan, but not a fervant one. Your joke went over my head.
Complete B-S. Not in a million years would that same ref give that same penalty in a similar situation against Brazil. These world cup refs are not little league amateurs.
With organizational scandals until the very last minute, and protests against the World Cup raging all over the country, could we risk an upset for the hosts in the opening game? Could we, god forbid, jeopardize even slightly their chance of advancing beyond the group stage in a major upset that would simply turn the country into civil unrest and cause a major fiasco for FIFA?
Your boy Sepp Blatter blew that whistle for the penalty.
To me it is idiotic in soccer/football that the referee cannot utililize video replay for penalties. He calls a potential penalty kick, why can’t he check upstairs to confirm? The game has already stopped so this is not slowing the game down other than to spend a couple minutes making sure it is a penalty. Ridiculous in my view.
I thought the penalty kick was kinda suspicious, which is why I was happy for that 3rd goal that made the penaty decision more-or-less irrelevant to the outcome.
At the same time, the ref doesn’t have the same angle and has less than a few seconds to call a foul. Yes, they mess up, but it takes more evidence to spot any systematic favoritism. Once you start second-guessing refs on a regular basis, things completely fall apart, and you might as well not have one at all.
No problem. The Swiss in hockey are known for an oppressive defensive style. Most of their international games end up being 1-0 type games.
When the Croats were in all-out attack to equalize, it made it easy for them to concede a 3rd goal. You can’t use the 2-goal difference for the winning team to argue that the penalty was irrelevant to the outcome - it changes the game and the strategy completely.
Suspicious penalties, dubious offsides, questionable ref calls have always been a part of the game. But when I was growing up watching soccer in the late 80’s and 90’s, this was just a topic for heated discussions between fans, sometimes even questioning the ref’s personal bias, but not much more than that. Some of the great players of the 90’s were also skillful ‘penalty artists’, you got to appreciate their ability to extract the maximum of a hopeless situation by playing the human factor. To have a ref error was “fair game” because it wasn’t due to bias but rather, imperfection in judgment, so it made things even more unpredictable. Hard to explain that the game was ‘perfect’ this way to someone who follows only US sports with triple-replays from 360-degree angle and all kinds of tech equipment to ensure all calls are fair.
This all changed in the 2000’s when FIFA turned from a sports organization that administered competitions into a multibillion dollar global corporate behemoth with insane economic and political power. You cannot see this change if you’ve only watched soccer in the post 1998 era. The corruption in FIFA is legendary, it casts shadows on any competition they organize regardless of how directly involved they are with putting pressure on refs.
Maybe that ref made an honest mistake by calling the penalty, because his visibility was limited and he didn’t have the right angle. But dude, you don’t call a penalty in a world cup game unless you are totally 100% sure. He would never call a similarly suspicious penalty against Brazil, cause he knows he would never ever ref another international game of this caliber. You don’t need any shady backdoor meetings with FIFA officials - the ref just knows this. That’s the type of sad influence FIFA has on the game nowadays.
Don’t like Mexico but nice save Ochoa.
My view was that the Swiss are neutral, therefore, they will not win nor lose their battles games. Perhaps I overthought it.
^ No, I think you got FTs joke.
1-1
didn’t expect such an early equalizer with zero ball possession. should make an interesting finish
Yuck.