Right. But this year, Neymar is clearly The Star of the Brazilian side. In 4 years, will he be The Star again? If so, then any pattern (and there may never have been one) will be broken.
On the other hand Messi, Christiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and “the two Robins” have all been The Star of their team for at least two straight WCs, at least to my naive eyes.
Ronaldo was The Star in both 98 and 2002 and if I had to bet I think Neymar will be next time round too.
Of course he will!
A+ It is not an infraction to be in an offside position if I don’t gain an advantage from it. If a player is in an offside position but standing near the touch line scratching his butt the flag should not go up. Now EPL lines seemed a few years ago to all have different interpretations of this rule. Some would only call it if the player was off side and gained an advantage. Some would call it instantly without ever waiting to see if the player gained an advantage. Not sure how they are calling it now.
To me, almost every player in an offside position is an advantage for the attacking team, simply because the defenders have to account for each one. Defenders/ goalie may have to adjust their positioning, watch for each, etc. I can’t think of too many situations in which it isn’t at least a slight advantage.
The terms used in the offside rule have specific meanings, as spelled out in http://www.fifa.com/mm/document/worldfootball/clubfootball/01/37/04/27/interpretation_law11_en.pdf . For example:
“gaining an advantage by being in that position” means playing a ball that
rebounds to him off a goalpost or the crossbar having been in an offside
position or playing a ball that rebounds to him off an opponent having
been in an offside position
As for the linesman, or “assistant referee”, flagging before the player receives the pass, that is addressed in example 4:
A player in an offside position (A) may be penalised before playing or
touching the ball, if, in the opinion of the referee, no other team-mate in an
onside position has the opportunity to play the ball
All this doesn’t stop TV pundits saying things like “how can he not have been interfering with play?”, when that term means nothing less than actually touching the ball while offside. I think it’s because they changed and published the guidelines only about 15 years ago, and perhaps some ex-players go on the offside rule as they knew it, if they ever did.
Yes, but when writing sentences, as opposed to showing scores at the top of the screen, it is far more normal to actually write the name of the country. Even FIFA themselves do that in their own writeups, saving the three letter codes for when they are short on space.
Write up uses the country’s name:
http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/matches/round=255953/match=300186488/match-report.html
Diagram of tournament uses code when short on space, otherwise uses the full name:
http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/matches/index.html
On a sidenote; when did Ivory Coast become Cote 'd’ivorie? Im not sure if this was our Television companies doing, or due to Fifa and their French background?
And UK commentators deciding its cool to start using more ethnically sounding pronunciation of names for names they had Anglicised for an entire Premiership season.
This ended up being discussed on The Guardian. IIRC the general feeling that there is no rhyme nor reason as to when you use the Anglicised name and when you use the local version. Generally speaking Spanish names have always been in Spanish (apart from, well, Spain) whereas other countries are all over the place.
A bit of googling comes up with this from Wikipedia:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
The name had long since been translated literally into other languages,[n 3] which the post-independence government considered to be increasingly troublesome whenever its international dealings extended beyond the Francophone sphere. Therefore, in April 1986, the government declared Côte d’Ivoire (or, more fully, République de Côte d’Ivoire[21]) to be its formal name for the purposes of diplomatic protocol, and officially refuses to recognize or accept any translation from French to another language in its international dealings.[20][22][23]
Despite the Ivorian government’s request, the English translation “Ivory Coast” (sometimes “the Ivory Coast”) is still frequently used in English, by various media outlets and publications.
[/QUOTE]
So I’m guessing that they asked FIFA to respect their wishes and FIFA complied.
In other news, in Swedish they are “Elfenbenskusten”, which breaks down as Elfenben (Ivory) Kusten (the coast), but ben also means “bone”, so I am tremendously dickish and jokingly refer to them as the “Elf Bone Coast”.
I think you’re misremembering Ronaldo’s level of stardom. In '97 he won the player of the year and the Ballon d’Or, and then won the Golden Ball at the World Cup in 1998. In 2002 he was runner-up for the Golden Ball and won the Golden Boot. 2006 was the year you’ve already credited him with. So essentially, I think, it boils down to Ronaldinho’s run as the superstar being a bit underwhelming.
Yeah, it seems my observation was flawed.
Nothing new about this; in 2006, NBC suddenly decided that Turin, Italy should always be called “Torino,” probably because all of the signage at the 2006 Winter Olympics said “Torino.” However, they didn’t apply this to Roma, or Firenze, or Napoli…
It also reminds me of when ABC suddenly decided that “Taiwan” should always be called “Chinese Taipei”, even during the Little League World Series, for no other reason than the Beijing government demanded that this is what it should be called during the Olympics.
Torino, Roma and Fiorentina just sounds better than Turin, Rome and Florence. And Gus Johnson pronouncing the Spanish midfielder’s name as Day-vid Vil-la was a crime against the brain.
“Fiorentina” isn’t the Italian name for Florence —“Firenze” is. There is, however, a football side from that city named “Fiorentina”. No idea why.
Fiorentina is just the adjective form of Firenze. Like Florentine and Florence.
Not sure if anyone noticed but Di Stefano died today.
Jogi Loew singularly unimpressed by WC refereeing
His thoughts on the Brazil-Colombia game mirror what many of us were thinking.
Amazing how much things have dropped off here since the U.S. have been gone.
Here we go with the semifinals.
I’m definitely cheering for Holland over Argentina, I guess I have a mild preference for Germany over Brazil, on the mild underdog principle, plus if Germany ends up winning it all it makes the US look better in retrospect for losing to them.
Well, earlier there were up to 4 games in one day, every day. Now there are 1-2 matches per day, with a few rest days in between. 