Posted on 07/07/2006 8:05:16 PM PDT by soccer_maniac
The World Cup Final will be held Sunday in Berlin at 2 p.m. ET (ABC).
Germany will face Portugal to play for third place on Saturday in Stuttgart at 3 p.m. ET (ESPN).
(Excerpt) Read more at fifaworldcup.yahoo.com ...
No, they didn't.
That said, this game was just a warm up before seeing the Italians triumph tomorrow :-)
Cheers.
I have to admit that I am just teasing you a bit.
Off course, Brazil has a great team and fantastic players.
Their record is second to none.
As a little kid in 1986 I cried when Brazil was eliminated.
Zico was my hero growing up.
But, that is just it. The winning Brazil sides of 94 and 2002 were very different from the teams managed by Santana. Instead of Socrates, we got Dunga.
I am dissapointed in Brazil, because I want to see Brazil play the way they did when I was a kid :-)
Cheers.
The 1982 word cup was the first world that followed it closely, I was 10 years old then, and since then I have never seen a better world cup. This one by the way was very lousy may be as bad if not worse than the 1990 world cup.
World Cup? Not quite for me; WORLD Series, yes; Stanley CUP,
maybe, but not quite into soccer. But that's just me. People running up and down the field, and up and down the field,
and up and down the field, and up and down the field, until maybe, MAYBE, one of them scores a GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAL!
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAL!
Who gives a rat's ass what you think? Why bother coming on this thread as a soccer troll? Tomorrow more than a billion people will watch the world's biggest sporting event. The "World" Series and Stanley Cup are minor events, which I enjoy as well. You can actually enjoy them all if you are a true sports fan.
If the run of play holds true to form, Italy shall raise the trophy as champion.
Hopefully a nice clean match with no bad ref calls or Henry flopping to the match grabbing his face when a player scruffs the glass and a blade blows up in the air striking him in the ankle and driving him to the turf.
I had gone back and reviewed the France Spain game where the defender is running with him to the ball and Henry falls backwards grabbing his face like he'd been shot. I'm a bit disgusted with Henry and sad for Spain to be sent off from such a bit of playacting.
So tomorrow, let's not mar the billion plus viewer's day with such an act.
The linesman better not muff it either on the offsides. You know Henry will be jumping and he should be flagged at least half a dozen times in the first half alone.
In the end we should see a tough defensive battle, but I'm looking for something special from this Italy team. They've stepped up with quality all over the field.
Forza Italia!
Thanks, great pictures.
And, congratulations for winning the Bronze!
You have been great hosts, and I look forward to the next time I get to visit your country.
I watched the Swedish coverage of todays game, and they talked about the highlights of the tournament. The one thing that people emphasised was how great Germany has been as a host.
You should be proud!
Cheers.
My dream is to see Pippo score the winning goal in extra time with his butt.
;-)
What a great game for the 3rd place - and the party afterwards was the most exciting for a third place of all times, wasn´t it? ;-) A little happy end for the host team, and yes, it was nice to see Chancellor Merkel handing the medals with President Köhler to the team instead of her predecessor.
It was Kahn´s last match in the German jersey, and he did great throughout his career.
The entire World Cup was perfect - the fans, the stadiums, the organisation, except maybe for the quality of soccer and the performance of the referees especially during the round of 16.
Thank you all for your valuable contributions to these threads, in particular many thanks to soccer_maniac for initiating this.
Thank you for watching the games and having been our guests in Germany - in reality or via TV. We hear even the Brits praise our hospitality, they even want to come back! Now if we had known that, we hadn´t been that nice, ;-).
We lived the motto "The world - a guest at friends" respectively "A time to make friends". I hope you enjoyed the World Cup as much as I did.
After the World Cup is before the Euro Championship. And then comes the qualification for the World Cup in South Africa. So, I´m looking forward for 2010 - maybe we´ll see final between Klini´s team (Germany, dfwgator, I´m not sorry to say that :-) and the US boys?? Though it´s highly unlikely, we have 4 years to dream.
For tomorrow: may the best team win - allez les bleus!! ;)
Goodnight!!
A nice game today as Germany made it watchable. Little surprised by Ricardo who played great up to today and then got beat on a hiccup. That ball must be making keepers crazy.
Of course you are correct tomorrow blue will win! (Italy will be wearing it!)
Should be a good one but no PKs please.
Well, if you look at it rationally, Italy should definitely win the final: In the semi-finals Italy had a slight edge over Germany, mainly because of their more experienced players and the fact that they had a ridiculously easy quarter-final (whereas Germany had to go through overtime and penalty kicks against Argentina). France and Portugal, on the other hand, were very evenly matched, and France only won within regular match time because of a penalty kick. If you now look at the way the German team, even without key players, pummeled the Portugueses' a**es, Italy - by comparison - on paper clearly looks like the stronger team.
However, if the game goes into extra time, Italy might encounter the same problems the Germans had in their match against Italy: Exhaustion and lack of concentration, because their semi-final was not only 30 minutes longer, but also had a lot faster pace than the 90 minutes snoozefest France-Portugal (only kidding).
However, I will root for our arch-enemies the French, because a.) one cannot hold football players responsible for Jacques Chirac and b.) Italy already won the Cup three times and another win would move Germany down to third place in the list of the all-time best soccer nations (Right now it's: Brazil 5, Germany 3, Italy 3, Uruguay 2, Argentina 2, France 1). Now where was England on this list. Yeah, right, they also won the cup - once ;-).
Well I'm not one to contest someone's desire for a certain outcome in a match.
People have lots of reasons why they'll pick one team or another. When I was in Paris during the final in 98, the decision had to be made on which team to support for the final.
I didn't make the decision until the day before. A friend had convinced me to pull for France because they were the host. Also, I was pretty tired of the whole Brazil bandwagon thing. It certainly was a great party afterwards. But back then, there was no big celebration with France's victory over Croatia in the semi-final, and there were people actually pretending nothing was going on after France won the Cup.
That didn't last long obviously as the streets were taken over. But it was funny how this one couple was trying to walk the street and act as if they didn't notice the party breaking out.
As for tomorrow, well I would normally go with your logic but the 3rd place game is probably not the best way to compare. I look to see the trend of who's in better form and who might have the technical advantage. The clear area of Italy's advantage is in goal. But that doesn't guarantee the outcome.
I'm just going to stay calm before the final song at the big dance.
It does seem the Germans want Klinsi back, we'll see if he's willing to continue the commute.
I hope we won't have to wait another 32 years for Germany to host again. I can't think of a better country to stage the World Cup.
As long as it's not held in Europe, the only time they won on European soil was 1958. But in South Africa in 2010, they should be the favorites.
I give a rat's ass what I think and I'm not a troll. I just said I'm not quite into soccer and I was kinda making fun of the low scoring affairs and that particular announcer who
says gooooooooooooooooooooooooooal. My attitude is, if millions of people love it, no problem, but I'm not one of them. The World Series and Stanley Cup might be minor events overseas, but not here in the US and Canada...in fact I would think they matter as much here as the World Cup does elsewhere.
let me add that more than a few people say that baseball is boring; it's too long. Not me--I think it has drama. Maybe
soccer has drama too, and I just don't see it. Maybe when it goes into the 163rd minute tomorrow and nobody's scored a goal yet, the drama will be sky high.
I don't agree the French have that good an attack. They haven't scored many goals. With Italy's strong defense they can play two forwards with no problem. Italy is a young team and France would be the oldest ever to win the cup. They have to wear France down by attacking constantly. Playing conservatively is playing into France's hands - letting Zidane control things.
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