I wish ESPN would stop preempting Mike & Mike in the morning on ESPN2 for this crap.
hmph Would have been nice to have this level of support when I used to play rugby for England. Bah!
You are correct - sports is so inferior to a couple of guys talking about sports.
Well, yes, if by “sports” you mean womens’ sports, which are so inferior/uninteresting that they had to pass a law (Title IX) to ensure their very existence. :dubious:
Do you live under a bridge? If not, what are you doing here?
Just watched (DVR’d) semifinal matches from today. Brazil vs. Australia was definitely the best match of the tournament so far. I thought Australia was out of it for sure when they were down 2-0, then they battled back and things were just really close from then on. Brazil’s final goal was AMAZING, as it was basically a one-on-five.
US vs. Brazil is going to be intense.
Wow
Brazil absolutely stomped the USA 4-0. I am on the west coast so just caught the last minute or so. Not sure what happened, but this score in women’s soccer is almost as much a shocker as if the USA men beat Brazil in a WC semi.
Yep, that was not a great game for the U.S. However, it differed in one important respect from the previous games – I got to see part of it! Thanks, Univision, or whatever Spanish-language station broadcasts on channel 60-something in Boston.
It was clear from the get-go that things were not going to go the U.S.'s way. But aside from that, I hated the U.S. team’s approach to the game. On the Goal blog on the NYTimes site, there’s an incisive piece of commentary from a reader: “Today’s game exposed the fatal weakness of Ryan’s notion that it is possible to play winning soccer against quality teams by thumping long, speculative, aimless balls upfield and hoping that something good will eventually come from the resulting chaos.” Exactly. It’s useless, and worse than that, boring. Dump and chase is for hockey, not soccer.
Ouch!
Well, this kind of makes up for the olympic gold medal game 3 years ago which the US won despite being mostly outplayed by Brazil.
Brazil’s 4th goal was (while obviously basically irrelevant) incredibly brilliantly pretty.
The 2nd-yellow-leading-to-red card call on Shannon Boxx, however, was absolutely positively the worst call I have ever seen in any sporting event, ever. The Brazilian player ran into Shannon Boxx from behind and knocked her over, and Boxx got called for a yellow card. It was preposterous.
That happens to us a lot. In the USA v Brazil friendly recently held in Chicago, a Brazillian player fell to the ground, apparently of his own volition (he may have slipped, the field was crap) and Carlos Bocanegra, who was in the same ZIP code, got called for a foul and yellow carded. Ronaldinho scored on the resulting free kick from about 20 yards out.
Hope Solo, the USA keeper who was benched in favor of 36 year old Briana Scurry (who hadn’t played a minute in the World Cup) is not happy.
*Widely considered one of the top goaltenders in the history of women’s soccer, Scurry did have a career record of 12-0 against Brazil, including a win over the South American side in the Olympic gold medal match in 2004.
However, the insertion of the 36-year-old was a gamble, especially since Solo had appeared in all four previous World Cup matches, and had posted a clean sheet in the previous three.
“The fact of the matter is that it is not 2004 anymore,” Solo said. "It’s 2007 and you have to live in the present and you can’t live in the past.
“It does not matter what someone did in an Olympic gold medal game three years ago. Now is what matters and that’s what I think.”
*
The first goal, which was a bone-headed gaffe, might not have occurred with Solo there. I say this because one of the most important things a keeper does is organize the defense. Scurry has not been playing and I’d be surprised if she was as efficient. I also wonder if maybe solo stops one or two of those other goals. Might have been a much different game with her in. Ryan needs to learn to dance with the one that got him there.
Greg Ryan, the USA Women’s coach, has been fired, due to his performance in this tournament. I’d rate his performance at about a C-. Not only was his creation of a goalkeeping controversy stupid, but his reliance on “English style” kick and run football unmade what had made this team great in the past, their control of the midfield. They showed a total lack of creativity ~and~ didn’t get the job done.