Posted on 06/17/2014 10:58:24 PM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
Thirty-two of the world's best football teams are now competing for the iconic golden World Cup trophy -- but the planet's most populous nation is not among them.
Team China failed to qualify for the "beautiful game's" showpiece event in Brazil. In fact China's World Cup dream turned into a nightmare as early as 2011, when it was eliminated in a regional qualifying round.
But for all the interest in football in this country of more than one billion people, it is a huge source of frustration that they can't field a competitive national team.
"China's weakness in football is a pain point and there is certainly an ambition to improve," said Scott Kronick, President of Ogilvy Public Relations Asia Pacific. Indeed, a multitude of Chinese -- from the state president, to a Peking University student, to a Beijing taxi driver -- share one Chinese dream: that Team China will one day win in the World Cup finals.
(Excerpt) Read more at ktuu.com ...
Definitely lots of coverage, especially Löw and Klinsmann facing against each other (Germany versus USA). They used to be manager (Klinsmann) and assistant manager (Löw) for Germany.
Julian Green is writing daily for a German paper.
The Dutch were in the clutch.
Casillas makes another error and sees Spain go down 0-2.
Chile leading 2-0 against Spain! That is not what I had bet on but it makes me happy, anyway :-p
The level of goalkeeping throughout the tournament, save for Ochoa’s performance yesterday, has been atrocious.
I called it. Spain is France 2002 all over again.
The Confederation Cup Final last year was the first sign that Spain was on the downhill slide.
France wasn’t this bad.
What was the deal with those Chilean fans storming the media center?
Spain has fallen hard.
Spain went down the drain
Will they even show up against Australia?
Take their passports
Australia 2
NETHERLANDS 3
Spain 0
CHILE 2
They will try to win that one. Going home with three defeats would hurt significantly more than with one victory.
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