World Cup 2010 South Africa

Germany showed nothing? You must've been watching a different game. Spain had a lot more possession and more chances and was the better side overall, but Germany was really dangerous on the break and had their own periods of dominance, their most notable chance probably being the Kroos shot. After they went down 1-0 they really had to start pressing and that opened up a lot of space for the Spanish, making the Germans look worse than they are. I do think their allowing Xabi Alonso time and space to execute was a poor mistake, though it may have been a function of closing down Xavi.

Germany fell victim to what Spain do really well, though: possession play. The possession play doesn't necessarily lead to chances, but to paraphrase Cruyff: if a team doesn't have the ball, it can't score.

"I'll just ignore whatever you just said and stubbornly restate my own opinion."

I never said they played great football, but you were calling the Dutch play 'tactically unsound', which is still ludicrous and you've shown no reason whatsoever why that would be so. You've claimed they gave Forlan too much space, while Forlan didn't have any space whatsoever throughout the game except for one moment. You claim they allowed too many runs over the flanks, but all those runs were contained and really didn't lead to any danger. What, then, was tactically unsound? How, exactly, should they have been positioned better tactically?

And again, you seem to be under the impression that an 8-man defense should be easy to penetrate. It's like you haven't seen any football this World Cup, because the story of this World Cup has consistently been poor teams beating or at least keeping contained better teams by playing with 7-man or more, very organised defense.

 

I think people had an overstated impression of how well Germany played because of the opponents they faced. Argentina and England sound like impressive opponents, but defensively they were shit, especially in those games. Argentina has a maximum of 5 people on defense at any point in time, and their defense is poorly organised. England had an absolute mess of a defense, which was dragged out of position oh so easily. There was never much of a chance Germany could repeat that performance against a well-organised side like Spain, or even Serbia earlier in the tournament. And Spain's constant early pressing helped a lot to disturb their build-up.

Again: have you seen *any* football this World Cup? At all? Switzerland-Spain? North-Korea-Brazil? Netherlands-anyone? Spain-anyone? Italy-anyone? Switzerland-anyone?

There's only been one side who really broke down opponents and that was Germany, but they did it against sides that did not defend in numbers and defended poorly.

This is pure fantasy. Forlan completed 39% of his passes, and passed the ball fewer times than anyone on the entire field except Van Persie and the keepers. He had room to shoot on goal a grand total of 1 time. How the fuck is that giving him room? If he had room, he'd have had the ball and done more with it.

They played unsound until they didn't play unsound?
You mean the Van der Vaart sub changed things? Because sure it did, the Dutch dominated midfield more and created more chances through combination football. But that that was a better option doesn't mean the initial tactics were unsound. An unsound tactic means a tactic is fundamentally flawed, but there was nothing fundamentally flawed about the first half tactics, it just wasn't as good as the second half tactics. Besides that, it wasn't as much a tactical change as it was a personnel change. Van der Vaart is a more offensive player than De Zeeuw, but he played in the same position and the formation didn't change courtesy of a tactical change but simply because Van der Vaart can't play as far back as De Zeeuw.

They did? Because Spain didn't get that many chances either. Mostly long-distance shots and I think 2 or 3 chances through open play. They dominated play, but they didn't create much (until Germany started to attack in numbers after going down 1-0). Which has, again, been the story of their World Cup.

 

The only interesting part about it is the world's fascination with this piece of fish-food. Every zoo in Germany and many outside do something like that, there's bound to be one occasion of an octopus getting 6 50/50 decisions in a row right.

 

1.5% that Paul specifically would get this right, higher actually because of the possibility of ties in the group stages. But that's not the relevant statistic, the relevant statistic is the chance that out of all the similar animal-choosing-result events around the world one would get this right. Which, given the amount of animal-choosing-result events, is probably around 100%.