An interesting synopsis of the World Cup so far, in terms of the scores, and the major players and disappointments, but somewhat flawed in logic for the rankings. Still, a good starter for a debate, as shown by some of the lively and astute readers’ comments. First flaw is putting far too much emphasis on the stats, particularly possession. As I’ve pointed out before, many teams with the most possession actually lost, sometimes badly. Today the Netherlands beat Chile 2-0 and the possession was 32% to 68% -- a huge gap that again proves how meaningless are statistics. Note that the Netherlands becomes the first team to get the maximum 9 points. Bit of a ho-hum game today against Chile, but as commentator Jon Champion put it, “a back burner of a game in Sao Paulo!” I just love Champion and his incredibly quick-witted comments, delivered with total dry humour. So far it looks as though Arjen Robben is the man of the tournament, closely followed by Karim Benzema. Second flaw has been mentioning how well or badly some teams have been without stressing who they were playing, and how those opponents were playing. A classic case is England who have been somewhat berated, but who, I thought, did pretty well. In hindsight, they may well have had the toughest group. Let’s not forget that they played 4 time champions Italy, 2 times champions Uruguay (and the current Copa America champions), and Costa Rica that is blowing everyone away with their talent. And, let’s not forget these games were very close, including some obvious penalties not given. The games could easily have gone either way, unlike the drubbing of Portugal by Germany, or of Spain by Chile. England just needed a few tweaks in defending/marking, and two or 3 player changes. We weren’t sure quite how good Netherlands were until they beat Chile today who beat Spain, and, although France are looking excellent, have they really been challenged yet? And, how good is a team that beats Cameroon, possibly the biggest disgrace of the tournament along with Honduras? Some teams have had it easy, so it’s very hard to compare apples with oranges. Which team gets the bore of the tournament award so far -- Russia, maybe? Time for Vladimir Putin to turn his eyes away from Ukraine and concentrate on his football team.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 02:10:46 +0000
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