[Mentalist]

watched the FRA-ISL replay. I'm now genuinely terrified for UA's qualifying matches against Iceland. They find ridiculous spaces for their passes (that first goal... sigh)

On the bright side, our Zozulya is about as mobile as Griesman, so that may help. But playing one striker against 4 defenders will be tough, and sadly, I don't see Fomenko altering his preferred tactics.

[Tiste Simeon]

Anyways is anyone else really not that bothered about the final tomorrow? More excited for Wimbledon tbh...

[Gothos]

OK so I finally got back from my vacation in the mountains (awesome stuff, by the way! worth the wait), so I have a few things to say about this tournament:

1. We may have lost but on the inside we've won. Best performance since the early 80s. CR7 played hillariously bad and cost his team at least two goals.
2. In their two games that I've watched (against Iceland and Germany), France were playing with the ref on their side, same as the entire tournament in '98. In the Iceland game, two situations were carbon copies of Germany - Italy game situations (hand in the penalty box, offensive foul) and while Boateng and Schweinsteiger were called on it (with the result being one penalty kick and one rejected goal), the French had no such trouble. Again in the Semi-final, an accidental hand contact is once again a penalty (whatever happened to indirect free kicks for that?!). This moment set the tone of the game as in the second half the tone was reversed. I'm not even going to mention the french getting away without a whistle for plays that should have been yellow cards at least.
3. Thomas Mueller has forgotten how to football. Seriously, might be this guy's performance sunk the Germans the most in the semi. Utter disappointment.
4. Wales with and without Ramsay is about 50 FIFA ranking spots apart.
5. I'm not going to watch the final. I can't find it in myself to cheer for either team at all. Although Griezmann seems to be, all other faults of the team aside, the star of the tournament and indeed a magnificent striker, but... I just can't.


BONUS! I hope nobobdy takes this the wrong way. Please hear me out till the end:
Whatever happened in Switzerland and France? I know for a fact that these countries are 80% or more "vanilla" europeans in populations, so... where's the disproportion in their national team coming from? Have the Swiss, Francien, Occitan and Breton and whatnot people just given up on sports? Or is there just so little talent there? Can they not be bothered to play? Are sports to become like blue collar jobs, left for immigrants while the locals sit in high glass office buildings? I don't get it.

[amphibian]

Griezmann is player of the tournament. And yes, lower income level people put out better athletes.

[Mentalist]

Griezmann v Ronaldo
Payet V Nani
Pogba v Santos

I like France's odds. 65:35 for France, imho.

[Macros]

I don't get the 100m for pogba.

[amphibian]

Macros, on 10 July 2016 - 09:25 AM, said:

I don't get the 100m for pogba.

I don't either, but I admit I have somewhat of a blind spot to players like Kroos and Pogba.

Kroos spends so much of his time pinging sideways passes and shutting down passing lanes when on defense that it's sometimes hard to appreciate him (for me). Pogba seems more like the box to box midfielder of old than Kroos though.

[amphibian]

Pogba also fouls a ton, with some of it being stupidly chippy.

Cristiano got fouled by Payet crashing into his knee, but the referee no-called it. My heart goes out to him.

This post has been edited by amphibian: 11 July 2016 - 01:21 AM

[Gothos]

Perhaps this offers me a way to make this work. If Portugal beats scummy villains France WITHOUT Ronaldo contributing, it's... okay, I guess.

Pretty shitty tournament overall. Change of format was disastrous.


Bonus points for giving Koscielny a yellow card for portugal's hand play. This sport needs a ref reform and it needs it yesterday.

[Mentalist]

Welp, there is no God.

All jokes aside, w/o Ronaldo, Portugal was semi-entertaining to watch.

Not sure about Dechamp's changes- I'm a big fan of Payet, and Gignac has been under-performing all tournament. There's an old football adage back home: "If you don't score, you get scored on".

re: challenge on Ronaldo- reckless, but he got ball first. As a defender, I'd say it was clean.

Sigh, now I'm gonna have to deal with 4 years of Portuguese being cocky about being Euro champs.

This post has been edited by Mentalist: 10 July 2016 - 09:38 PM

[Gothos]

It's amazing what this team can achieve without Ronaldo on the field screwing things up!

[Gorefest]

Jesus wept.

[amphibian]

The challenge would have been OK to me if the end result had been Payet moving past Cristiano to go for the ball.

Instead, he pokes the ball and puts the leg of Cristiano in between his legs. That was designed to take out Cristiano and if that happened to me on the field, I would fight the other person and take the red card. I'd probably also mess that person up before the other people on the field broke us up.

That's a knee being damaged (the foot and knee were nearly 75 degrees out of alignment). I don't mind a shove to the upper body or the occasional ankle chip by a foot raking in, but crashing into my knee isn't okay on any level.

This post has been edited by amphibian: 11 July 2016 - 07:38 AM

[Siergiej]

I wept.

I started watching football circa 2001 and Euro 2016 was the first major tournament I didn't enjoy. Iceland v England was glorious, it was also nice to watch Poland finally not disgrace ourselves, but apart from that pretty boring. The UEFA reform is terrible and Portugal winning is a crime against football.

[Gorefest]

Not to worry, in two years time the Netherlands will be present again and all will be well.

[Mentalist]

I can't in good conscience blame the new format, since it gave UA a chance to break the playoffs curse (nevermind that we proceeded to then be the worst-performing team in the tournament). Ukraine had a solid qualifier, with the exception of dropping points in the home opener against Slovakia- and under the old rules, this would have been enough to make sure we never had a shot at the finals.

But what the expansion meant is that for every strong, balanced, offensive-minded team out there, there were about 1.5 teams that focused almost entirely on defense and relied on a few key players for counters. Which is why LOTS of matches became pure offense v defense football, which can be far less entertaining to watch. This predominance of "closed" games (which is often the safer tactic against an objectively better team) is what helped influence who made it through playoffs.

This post has been edited by Mentalist: 11 July 2016 - 02:01 PM

[Gorefest]

Plus in this new system you get the ridiculous situation that a team that has only won *one* match during the entire tournament within the normal 90 minute game slot has picked up the trophy. Utterly ludicrous. As you say, the format rewards conservative and defensive football over attraction and flair.

[amphibian]

I would be OK with a revision of the yellow card rule. Something like three games with a yellow = 1 game suspension.

[Siergiej]

Gorefest, on 11 July 2016 - 12:12 PM, said:

Plus in this new system you get the ridiculous situation that a team that has only won *one* match during the entire tournament within the normal 90 minute game slot has picked up the trophy. Utterly ludicrous. As you say, the format rewards conservative and defensive football over attraction and flair.

Yeah, that's the biggest issue with the new format. Portugal scored three draws in the weakest group imaginable and still proceeded to the knockout stage.

This post has been edited by Siergiej: 11 July 2016 - 12:49 PM

[Coltaine -]

Missed most of the game. I was on a birthday party at that time. Only saw the last 40 minutes or so.

Portugal played not bad. Better than with Ronaldo. I still had the feeling that France was overall the better team, but basically they turned into Germany. No luck with scoring a goal.

Siergiej, on 11 July 2016 - 12:49 PM, said:

Gorefest, on 11 July 2016 - 12:12 PM, said:

Plus in this new system you get the ridiculous situation that a team that has only won *one* match during the entire tournament within the normal 90 minute game slot has picked up the trophy. Utterly ludicrous. As you say, the format rewards conservative and defensive football over attraction and flair.

Yeah, that's the biggest issue with the new format. Portugal scored three draws in the weakest group imaginable and still proceeded to the knockout stage.

True