six teams left - who's going to win?

Who are the teams left then? Then I can be more accurate with my pin!

[Smiley]! Fredrik

Looking dodgey now, if Rooney is out and Beckahm injured. I have just been shopping, and I asked the crowd by the televisons!

Fredrik

PS: Was still nil nil a few minutes ago...

Portugal through, then. I don't want to hear any more! Fredrik

What a dreadful bunch of kevins. Just as well they're out, so that leaves a few real football players (not that the Portugeese were much better).

G

England showed great spirit once the shackles of Sven's tactics were removed. Probably had a moral victory as with 11 v 10 Portugal did not show the courage to go on and win it.

In reality England have gone as far as they could, all the reamining teams are better.


And I don't think I've ever seen a goalie like Ricardo!


Still horrible way to go out.

SJB

Boring!

Now the tennis is a relief.

Some excitement!

And Scottish interest too!

Anybody but Brazil..........

Come on Italy! I've got £25 at 10/1 on them which is the only fun I have left in the tournament.

I was puzzled by Rooney's sending off, surely to deserve a red card for "stamping" there has to be some obvious malice or intent to stamp on the opponent? As far as I could tell he stood on Carvalho's leg, but there was no obvious downward motion or stamping, just competition for the ball. Disappointed for Lampard, Gerrard and Carragher, all of them can handle the pressure of a penalty shoot out and generally would be certainties to hit the back of the net.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by John Channing:
As far as I could tell he stood on Carvalho's leg, but there was no obvious downward motion or stamping
____________________________________________________________________________________________________

I saw a good old stamp to the goolies.

France or Germany look like possible worthy winners.


Portugal today and against Holland displayed blatant diving and gamesmanship.

To quote Edwin Van Der Saar "the portuguese players targeted our players on yellow cards to see if they could get them sent off, I didn't like to see that."

Hopefully Portugal will not win the world Cup, it would be proof that cheats do prosper if they do.

It will certainly be interesting on the first day of training at United, I suspect Ronaldo is better off leaving Man United because he's likely to be booed at Premiership grounds if he stays.

When the BBC commentary team fail to defend Rooney for the stamping you know it's a done deal.

Saying that, I felt that the "stamping" happened as a result of the exuberance of the three players trying to gain possession of the ball.

Maybe Rooney became a victim of circumstance but one thing is perfectly clear - the resulting indiscipline led to his demise.

SGE has failed to teach the England squad two things that are vital. Discipline and Pride.

Possess both and you can win with dignity.

Germany vs. France final IMO

The stamp didn't look deliberate to me and I'd have thought the push only warranted a booking - do both right in front of the referee though and there is always a fair chance of an early bath.

quote:

Originally posted by Peter C:
Hopefully Portugal will not win the world Cup, it would be proof that cheats do prosper if they do.

Most teams have players that will cheat if given a chance. Joe Cole (who's an excellent player) has dived more than most at the tournament, and it was one of his dives that got England through against Ecuador.

There has been some truely disgraceful stuff though (e.g. Henry in the last round and most of the Holland side in most of their games) and the referees unwillingness to get the cards out for it was dissapointing.

To me France are the only team left that would be worthy winners of the tournament.

Although the manner of England's defeat was unpleasent and Ronaldo's behaviour was disgusting - lets hope Man Utd unload him and find somebody with a better personality to sit on the subs bench - England played some of the most negative football I've seen. It is good riddance to Seven Goran Ericsson, lets hope Steve McLaren without SGE can bring in the right team. One tip from me, is to select players in the squad that you intend to play - don't take players for the ride.

My preference, and I'm usually wrong, is Italy vs France in the final.

I'd also like asking for another player to be booked or sent-off become a sending off offence in itself with a 5 batch ban. I think that might stop it - I'd apply the same to any player caught cheating: though I'd use video evidence to varify this, as I would not like Maxi Rodriguez who was booked for diving, when he was clearly fouled in the penalty area, suspended. It is a shame the best football team, Argentina, did not progress - whether intentional or not, I did not see a more one sided refereeing performance in the entire tournamant: gave a whole new meaning to the term homer.

Last comment on England vs Portugal - shame there had to be a winner: neither side deserved a semi-final place.

Oh well, back to normal - World Cup over for another 4 years. Next time take some forwards.

Absolutely gutted that England have gone out, but they never really got going in this tournament. I thought the best player on the pitch was hargreaves who just kept going and going like the energizer bunny. I just felt on the whole our big players didn't step up to the challenge, especially Gerrard and Lampard who have in the past inspired thier clubs on in similar circumstances.

The red card was bad, but looking at the replay you can't do that ("I saw a good old stamp to the goolies" as Malky so eloquently put it) in front of the ref and be surprised at a red. My only frustration was that I thought he may have been fouled himself by the 3 portugese players manhandling him off the ball. England played with some grit after the sending off and still created a couple of chances.

Then the penalties, if the oppostion misses/your golie saves 2 of thier penalties you have to take advantage and we didn't.

Now it's onto McClaren's reign as coach and I'm somewhat numb thinking about it. I just hope he brings more balance to the side. I've just seen that Beckham has announced that he is standing down as captain (but not retiring from international football). I think this will give McClaren a clean slate and he should install either Terry or Gerrard as captain and I think the latter may be a better choice since I think it may help bring out the best in him for England.

As for the other game I didn't want either to win. I though the French would well, just be too smug if they won it again and every real football fan who comes out every 4 years (there's a lot of them in Canada) are creaming thier pants over a very average looking Brazil.

After watching the game my opinion has changed and I would like the French to win it. The reason, Zidane and Ribery. When it has been needed over the last two games Zidane has really stepped up to prove he is a world class player and in my opinion one of the all time great players. I'd written him off and said so, that I thought he was too old and past it, but he really rolled back the years and has put in performances when France needed him. Also over the last couple of games Ribery (who I had not seen before this WC) has really looked like an exciting player with a great touch and vision.

I've watched the Rooney incident a few times and I still don't see a stamp on purpose. I think he was sent off because he pushed Ronaldo. He should have only been given a yellow.

Ronaldo is a devious sod and I wish him the worst of luck. It's been a good World Cup and Ronaldo has done his best to ruin it. Even before the match started there was footage of him whispering in Rooney's ear coupled with a gentle head butt. Git.

Lampard was garbage throughout the whole tournament and should have been taken off in the Swedish match to give someone else a chance.

We never had an attack formation in the five games. Sven is to blame, but as he's been paid millions for a life of luxury, I don't suppose he gives a toss.

The Portuguese goalie was superb and I only wish ours was.

Rooney could be one of the brightest talents of his generation. However, unless he, and whoever manages him in the future, learns to control that temperament, he could easily end up as damaged goods a la Gazza.
He stamped on the bloke, come on, admit it.

Germany v France final with Germany to shade it in the best final for years.

France have had an amazing turnaround, but the host nation deserve the success for a fantastically well run tournament and the great welcome they gave to the fans.

The only shame was the ticketing arrangements. Touts have made a stack of money from the fans. They should have the Rooney treatment on their goolies.

Nic

quote:

Originally posted by Two-Sheds:

After watching the game my opinion has changed and I would like the French to win it. The reason, Zidane and Ribery. When it has been needed over the last two games Zidane has really stepped up to prove he is a world class player and in my opinion one of the all time great players. I'd written him off and said so, that I thought he was too old and past it, but he really rolled back the years and has put in performances when France needed him. Also over the last couple of games Ribery (who I had not seen before this WC) has really looked like an exciting player with a great touch and vision.

Hear hear.

Zinedine Zidane was once aagain absolutely world class in the last 2 games. Against Brazil it struck me that his teammates realized they had a genius amongst them and raised their games accordingly. Patrick Vieira did not look like the player so comprehensively outfought by Arsenal in the Champions League and Thierry Henry finally did for his country what he seems able to do at will for the Gunners. Special mention too for Frank Ribery with a fine display of wing play.

If you like decent attacking football then there is only 1 team left to support;

Allez les blues!

Richard S

Sadly, a tournament that will be remembered for poor officiating rather than good football. I have yet to see a really good game and I think the refs and fifa have a lot to do with this.

Too much diving and feigning injury. So Rooney stood on that fellas plumbs. So what. Yellow card (and the ref clearly didn't see it anyway). Ronaldo got him sent off and the push gave the ref the excuse he needed.

Ronaldo would do well to stay away from Utd this season. I think the wink told everyone what they needed to know about what really happened.

France v Italy final. Italy win by a late penalty courtesy of a Totti dive.

Two-Sheds

I agree with just about every word you have written from 'absolutely' to 'vision'.

I look forward with some trepidation to McClaren's era and hope that he makes Gerrard captain for the reason that you gave. I take some comfort from the fact that if McClaren doesn't deliver by Euro 2008 he is unlikely to stay in the job until 2010.

And as for Germany 2006, though it pains me to join this particular chorus,

Allez les blues.

Jol: 'Ronaldo is a disgrace to football'
Sunday July 02 2006

Tottenham manager Martin Jol has launched a scathing attack on Cristiano Ronaldo following England's World Cup defeat to Portugal, describing the ManYoo winger as a "disgrace to football".

Ronaldo lead the Portuguese protestations after ManYoo team-mate Rooney trod on the grounded Ricardo Carvalho during the quarter-final. In the melee that ensued, Rooney pushed Ronaldo – an action for which it appeared he was dismissed.

Unless you've just popped out of a coma, you may have already seen the incident for yourself on the tele.

'To lose in those circumstances was a disgrace. And the biggest disgrace of all was Cristiano Ronaldo,' wrote Jol in his column for The Sunday Times.

'The key incident in the game was Wayne Rooney's sending-off. It wasn't even a booking.

'When Rooney trampled on Ricardo Carvalho, he didn't do it on purpose. Before that he was being impeded and should have had a foul anyway. The referee blew his whistle and paused and was thinking of what to do when Ronaldo ran over and asked him to show a card. It's how Ronaldo always behaves, trying to influence referees, and it turns my stomach when players do that.

'I thought to myself, how could he do that? You could argue that Ronaldo is playing for his country in a World Cup, so it's okay to do anything to win. I don't believe that. What about sporting values? Rooney is his club teammate, and judging by the way they walked out together at the start, joking, his friend? It was a double betrayal, a disaster for football.'


Well spoken Martin Jol, my sentiments entirely.


Its also true Henry was guilty of gamesmanship against Spain, however with Zidane proving he is still world class, you fancy France to win the World Cup.

Peter - great post.

Martin Jol is 100% right with his honest words and totally condemnation of Cristiano Rubbish's behaviour. Never a popular player and certainly an ineffective one, I think Man Utd would do well to unload Cristiano Rubbish before the start of next season.

With Henry, I was surprised - it is not his usual way As you say, Zidane is world class, he is the reason that I'd like to see France win the World Cup.

Apologies for nicking this straight from the guardian but I think it sums it all up

---

In the aftermath of a punishing defeat, no man should be called to account for his impromptu remarks. But when Frank Lampard said on Saturday night that England had "deserved" to win the match in which defeat had just eliminated them from the World Cup, he was inadvertently exposing the problem at the heart of the team's consistent inability to scale the highest peaks.

David Beckham had used the same word earlier in the campaign. England would get to the World Cup final, the captain said, because they "deserved" to be there. Since no deeper analysis was forthcoming, his listeners were left to infer that the evidence in support of his contention might have included any or all of the following: England's historic role as the game's mother country; the vast popularity of the Premiership at home and abroad; the inflated pay and celebrity status of its players; and the attention lavished on the public appearances of their wives and girlfriends

When Sven-Goran Eriksson also spoke about the team "deserving" to reach the final, he tried to suggest that it was because of the quality of their football. Strictly on the basis of their successive performances against Hungary, Jamaica, Paraguay, Trinidad & Tobago, Sweden and Ecuador, however, it would have taken a battalion of the world's finest legal advocates to make a case for the justice of their arrival in the final rounds of the biggest international football tournament of all.

The attitude represented by the words of Lampard and Beckham represents a culture of complacency at work, and it could be seen in the climactic shoot-out against Portugal, when three of England's penalty takers failed with attempts in which the slackness of their body language and their shooting spoke of men who were ready to put their trust in the belief, as England players have believed for several generations, that their reputations alone would be enough to ensure their success.

A successful apprenticeship in the upper reaches of English football wraps such an effective comfort blanket around a young player that he is seldom exposed to the harsh realities of the outside world, and never confronts those moments in which failure really does mean disaster. When they are called to summon reserves of resilience at moments of extreme pressure, they discover those reserves either do not exist or have been depleted by the demands of domestic football.

Where, on Saturday, was the Englishman prepared to take control of the game as Zinédine Zidane would do in France's defeat of Brazil later that night? The only candidate was Owen Hargreaves, who both converted his penalty - the one Englishman to do so - and secured the man- of-the-match award with 120 minutes of non-stop tackling, intercepting, running and passing. Alone among his colleagues, he displayed a dynamism that seemed to come from within. What also makes him unique among the squad, of course, is that he has never lived in England. The two things may not be unconnected.

Before Hargreaves was born, his parents left Britain to make a new life for their family in Canada. They succeeded, and in so doing may have laid the mental foundation for his son's career. Owen Hargreaves arrived in Munich as a 16-year-old and began a long struggle to establish himself among the superstars in the first team at Bayern, in a country where he knew no one and had to learn the language from scratch. When times were difficult, when he was dropped or suffered injuries, his parents' example of ambition and self-sufficiency can have done him no harm.

Hargreaves may also have benefited from the Bundesliga's 34-match season and its mid-winter break. Whereas he faced up to Portugal's challenge with what the English like to see as their characteristic qualities of energy and doggedness, his native-born team-mates struggled to turn their talent and desire for success into the currency of coherent football.

Individually, there was much to admire in their display - in Ashley Cole's gradual return to form, in John Terry's obduracy, in Aaron Lennon's zigzag runs and in Peter Crouch's sheer willingness - but collectively they could only demonstrate the difficulty they experience in achieving, even sporadically, the kind of momentum that the better sides in this tournament have maintained virtually from first whistle to last.

Permutating his resources for the fifth time in five matches as he responded to the opposition's strengths and his own squad's injuries, Eriksson asked Hargreaves to provide a screen for the defence while a midfield quartet attempted to support Wayne Rooney, the lone front runner. That it took the coach so long to reach this conclusion, after having Hargreaves in his squad for almost five years, is among the most serious indictments of his regime.

The fatal flaw in the way the formation was applied was the use of Rio Ferdinand as the launchpad for attacks. On countless occasions the ball was given to the centre-back in the expectation that he would make the first significant pass. He would take a touch to control the ball, look up, take another touch, look up again, have another think and then, after a delay often of six or seven seconds, play it - not always accurately - to a team-mate.

By the time he was ready to part with the ball, two things would have happened: first, his team-mates had effectively come to a standstill; second, the Portuguese defenders had been given the time to move in to cover them. So almost every England move would start from a static position, with the opposition well prepared for counter-measures.

Although Ferdinand is a decent passer of the ball, he is not Andrea Pirlo. Neither is Hargreaves, but he should have been encouraged to become the kind of pivot that Claude Makelele represents for Chelsea and France, taking the ball from the defence and recycling it to the midfield with the minimum of fuss or wasted time, acting as the team's metronome. Then England might have had a chance to develop the kind of rhythm and movement that we sometimes see from Arsenal, Chelsea and, less frequently nowadays, Manchester United, but at which English-born players in general have never been adept.

When the Football Association hired Eriksson as England's first foreign coach, it was reasonable to expect that an improvement in fluidity was among the benefits the players could expect from his long experience in Italy and Portugal. All they got, really, was a swift application of common sense to a formerly chaotic selection policy and a discovery that Eriksson's notion of an acceptable standard of living matched their own five-star expectations.

His inability to get Englishmen to play football together with a combination of spontaneity and consistency means that, after its promising start, the Eriksson era must on balance be accounted a failure. Sadly, given the unfailing courtesy with which he confronted an often hostile environment, he was not the man to dismantle the mental barrier that prevented his players from turning their talents into real achievement at international level. In the end they, and he, deserved no more than they got.

---

SJB

Well with 6 teams left and with six euro in a Paddy Power account from the last world cup I placed a few bets.

1. Final Pairing €1 Italy vs France 12/1
   
2. Outright winner France 11/1
   
3. 1st and 2nd - Italy, France 22/1
   
4. Portugal to beat England 7/2
   

I'll be watching the final in Skipton and if France play like they did tonight my 22/1 shot will come in.



SJB