Yes, it has been a strange game, Liverpool clearly dominating while having no clear chances and Real scoring with their very first chance. Bu as we all know, football sometimes works this way.
As a Barcelona fan, I’ve seen this type of game a lot over the years. Much more possession and 0.1xG shots (although less so recently) and undone by a single counter-attack,
If Real pulls this off, Courtois will be man of the match!
He should be. It’s not even close, IMO. Although their entire defense has been excellent. Liverpool have been pretty good too. Recently finals have been pretty bad from an entertainment perspective so this is a welcome change.
I think that was the perfect goalkeeping performance from Courtois. Incredible saves from Salah and Mane.
Courtois was great. It feels like Liverpool wins that match against even just marginally worse goalkeeping. Here’s hoping he’s not so good against Canada in the WC :).
Happy for Forest today, but that did look like a clear penalty against them. I only saw the brief highlights though, so maybe there was more to it.
A US-centric post: Nations League is a nice opportunity to watch your favorite European national team at work. Unfortunately, even though Fox owns it, they are streaming a lot of it through Fubo, which is expensive. Here’s the TV schedule so far:
UEFA Nations League TV Schedule and Links (worldsoccertalk.com)
I’m waiting to see who the Spanish-language partners are, maybe there’ll be some luck there.
Dreadful, mostly-one-sided first sixty minutes in the Scotland – Ukraine WC playoff first round, but the second half has gotten exciting.
Well I don’t know how much to take from this Argentina-Italy Finalissima game, Argentina won 3-0 very convincingly but this is only a pseudo-friendly game for a not very important cup.
However… did you see how Messi, Di Maria, Lautaro and De Paul played?, the bastards got me hoping again, I may never forgive them. If I die of a heart attack in a counterattack in the round of 8 in the world cup it would be their fault for making me hope again.
Was it an important cup in the past? I hadn’t heard of this game until today and didn’t know it was previously played either.
When the confederations cup was going on it obviously wasn’t as important as a confederation championship or the WC, but people still took it pretty seriously.
It was played too few times to be very important, this is only the 3rd time I think, it was replaced by the confederations cup, and now revived because the confederations cup is no longer played.
Ah, makes sense.
I wish the confederations cup would have stuck around. It was a fun WC jr and gave the Gold Cup a lot more heft as a USMNT fan.
A couple of Spurs took home major honors yesterday. Son Heung-Min was awarded South Korea’s highest sporting award, in a ceremony with the President. Not sure what took them so long; unless I’m overlooking someone he’s been the most successful athlete in Korean history for like the last five years.
Also, Gareth Bale was inducted into the Order of the British Empire for donating a million pounds to hospitals, so good on him. Kane made the grade a few years back, so if Bale comes back next year, we could have two OBEs on the pitch. Trying to think of a chant mocking Arsenal for their lack of OBEs…
Have you heard of speed skating or Tae Kwon Do? You may not know the stars (I don’t either) but I do know Koreans (not Korean Americans) who are nuts about those sports.
Yes, I’ve heard of them, but that’s about it. I would have assumed that any Korean athlete with a higher profile than Son must be toiling in some sport which is obscure by American standards. They have some pretty good players in MLB, but I don’t think any of them are as dominant in their sport as Son is in his.
If Ukraine defeats Wales, which World Cup group do they get drawn into? Iran+England+USA?
That is indeed the group.
Looking it up there are a handful of Koreans that have made the MLB all-star team once each. Son has never made the fifPro best 11 or probably been seriously considered. That’s significantly more selective though. Looks like there are 7-8 people in each position for the MLB all-star game? Son was probably in the top 8 forwards in the world 4-5 times in his career? I guess ESPN rated him 6 this year and 7 last year.
There are a lot more soccer players than baseball players in the world, though. It would probably be fairer to compare MLB to just the Premier League.
Also, the All-Star rosters IIRC have 30 players, slightly more than regular season games. About half of them are pitchers and there are eight other positions to cover, so there aren’t 7-8 of each position, it’s more like 2 of each (though of course many players are capable of playing multiple positions).
No matter who wins Sunday’s Wales-Ukraine match, the USMNT is going to have a difficult time getting out of group play.