Being an American, I only pay attention to soccer once every four years. As such, I’m unfamiliar with the way scores are reported. I’ve noticed the official World Cup website has a curious way of reporting the scores. See for example the first match between France and Senegal, which I’ll use, because everyone who cares will have seen it. The score line on the FIFA website: http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/en/t/s/g.html is FRA : SEN 0:1 (0:1)
I get the first part, Senegal beat France by a score of 1-0. But what in the blazes is the (0:1)? It doesn’t seem to be correlated to score, standings, penalties, or anything else I can figure out. What’s going on here?
)et me preface this by saying that I’m no soccer afficionado (unless being a really mediocore youth league player counts as such), but I believe the (0:1) means that the score was tied after regulation play and that Senegal beat France either in overtime or penalty kicks.
No, I don’t think so, since every score has numbers in parentheses after it. Upon further reflection, they may have something to do with assists, since the numbers are never higher than the number of goals, and seem to be somewhat proportional to them. For instance, the highest parenthetical number is in the Germany-S.A. match which reads 8:0 (4:0). Still not exactly sure though. Assisted goals? Unassisted goals? What?
Um… No. There are several scores like 3:1 (1:0) and 2:2 (0:1), which can’t happen if it indicates shoot-out scores.
No, it’s more likely that the numbers in parentheses indicates the win-loss totals for the team. They’ve only played one game so far, so most show either one win or one loss.
The other useful thing to note about results is that if you see a goal credited in the 47th minute like this - 47+ rather than just 47 it signifies that the goal was scored in the 2nd minute of time added on in the first half (each half being 45 minutes long) rather than in the 2nd minute of the second half.
Since this is a world cup thread you should just feign a life threatening injury, roll around holding something with a look of excruciating pain on your face, and hope nobody notices the fact you screwed up.
Don’t know whether ignatius_reilly got out of bed in time, but somebody must’ve done something right - U.S.A. won 3-2 (3-1 at half time).
The reason why the half time scores are given at all is just because it’s a simple way of summarising the order of scoring. And say your team was behind at mid-way but came back to win it gives you an impression of how they improved during the game. It’s a bit of a cliché over here to say “football is a game of two halves” but you do very often find that the state of play changes after the managers have had a chance to give the palyers their half time pep talk.
