FIFA World Cup 2018

[MDK]

53 minutes ago, Toe said:

Good article from The Ringer about the USMNT and their failure to qualify.

https://www.theringer.com/2018/6/5/17428184/2018-world-cup-us-soccer-inside-story-jurgen-klinsmann-sunil-gulati-bruce-arena

If the USMNT and whatever the US FA is called decided to put some dosh and changed up the way youth football in the states was done they'd probably win the World Cup in a decade or two.

[9 to 5]

France to win, Serbia to make the last 8, Lukaku and/or Werner to be top scorers, Eriksen to be top Denmark scorer,  Peru to make last 16, Lewandowski, Lukaku, Messi and Neymar all to score 2 each at least and every team to get a goal each.

My bets so far.

[DavidMarrio]

£5 - Over 0.5 goals in every group game @ 50/1 = £255

£1.50 - Coutinho, Eriksen, De Bruyne, Rodriguez to all score from outside the penalty area @ 50/1 = £76.50

£1.50 - Brazil and Germany to win all their group games, Panama and Iran to lose all their games @ 80/1 = £121.50

£2 - Poland, Sweden, Serbia, Denmark, Egypt, England, Croatia and Portugal all to qualify @ 80/1 = £162

£5 - At least 1 goal in every match @ 80/1 = £405 
 

[MDK]

17 minutes ago, DMo Salah said:

Poland

43 minutes ago, 9 to 5 said:

Lewandowski

[Gazz]

2 hours ago, MDK said:

If the USMNT and whatever the US FA is called decided to put some dosh and changed up the way youth football in the states was done they'd probably win the World Cup in a decade or two.

I read somewhere that the average cost to play on a grassroots youth team is $6000 a year so the prospective talent pool is massively constricted due to ability to pay. 

I charge £20 a month... 

[Lineker]

Quote

Argentina have cancelled their final World Cup warm-up match against Israel, striker Gonzalo Higuaín said on Tuesday, as political pressure grew before Saturday’s scheduled fixture in Jerusalem.

“They’ve finally done the right thing,” Higuaín said in an interview with ESPN, confirming reports the game had been cancelled.

The match at Jerusalem’s Teddy Kollek Stadium was to be Argentina’s last before they start their World Cup campaign in Russia against Iceland on 16 June.

There was no initial reaction from the Israeli FA or from Israeli politicians. Reports said that the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had called the Argentinian president, Mauricio Macri, to ask him to persuade the team not to cancel their visit.

Israel Radio quoted an unnamed diplomatic official who said the chances of salvaging the fixture were very slim.

The visit of the two-times World Cup winners had attracted huge interest among Israeli fans, mainly because of Lionel Messi’s planned participation.

Palestinians celebrated the cancellation. People in Gaza cheered and in Ramallah in the West Bank, the Palestinian FA issued a statement thanking Messi and his colleagues for cancelling the game.

“The Palestinian FA thanks Argentina’s players led by star Messi for refusing to be used to serve a non-sporting goal,” it read.

The Palestinian FA chairman, Jibril Rajoub, said: “Values, morals and sport have secured a victory today and a red card was raised at Israel through the cancellation of the game.”

Rajoub has called a news conference for Wednesday in Ramallah, which he will hold outside the Argentinian representative’s office. On Sunday he called for Palestinians to burn replica shirts and pictures of Messi.

The stadium which was to host the match is in west Jerusalem. The Palestinians want the eastern part of the city as the capital of a future state that will include the Gaza Strip and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

However, the status of Jerusalem is highly sensitive. The match was originally planned to be played in Haifa but Israeli authorities contributed funding for it to be moved to Jerusalem, irking Palestinians further following the United States president Donald Trump’s recognition of the city as Israel’s capital. The US embassy was moved there last month.

The cancellation is just one more obstacle for Argentina, whose World Cup preparations have been troubled this time around.

They suffered a 6-1 defeat by Spain in a friendly in March and lost their first-choice goalkeeper, Sergio Romero, to injury, giving little encouragement to fans who watched the team struggle to qualify for the tournament in Russia.

Argentina face Iceland, Nigeria and Croatia in what is considered to be one of the hardest groups in the tournament.

[MDK]

So if they just had it in Haifa it would have been okay?

Look, I'm willing to overlook a lot of stuff about Israel/Palestine/Whoever else but once it starts affecting football then it is serious.

[Lineker]

Danny Rose has launched a pre-emptive strike against the inevitable racism:

Until now, England’s footballers had not given the overall impression they were drastically alarmed about the possibility of racism marring the World Cup. Ashley Young was asked last week if his family would accompany him to Russia and made it clear that, this being his first World Cup, of course they would be there. Danny Welbeck was asked the same question and pointed out that when Arsenal had played a Europa League tie against CSKA Moscow in April it had passed off without any issues.

But then came Danny Rose’s response and the realisation that, inside the England camp, there was at least one player who had already decided he could not risk his family being in Russia and asked them to stay away.

That, plainly, was not an easy conversation for the England and Tottenham Hotspur left-back when his father, Nigel, regularly travels from home in Doncaster to watch him play in London, sometimes not getting back from night games until 3am and being up for work at 7am. Rose could hear his father’s voice crack when he asked him to stay at home but he also remains convinced it is the correct decision.

“I’m not worried for myself. But I’ve told my family I don’t want them going out there because of racism and anything else that may happen,” Rose said. “I don’t want to be worrying, when I’m trying to prepare for games, for my family’s safety.

“My dad’s really upset. I could hear it in his voice. He said he may never get a chance again to come and watch me in a World Cup. That was emotional, hearing that. It’s really sad. It’s just how it is. Somehow Russia got the World Cup and we have to get on with it.”

It is the first time an England footballer has taken such drastic action before a major tournament and Rose’s decision-making has clearly been influenced by his memories of England’s under-21 game in Serbia in October 2012. On that occasion he was subjected to monkey chants and pelted with stones before being sent off for kicking the ball into the stand, his second bookable offence. Nigel described it as like “a bad dream”.

In which case it is easy to comprehend why, almost six years later, Rose says he has “no faith in the justice system”, why he feels “numb” about the prospect of something similar happening again and why Fifa’s latest fine – £22,000 for the Russian Football Federation for racist chanting in a friendly against France – is “disgusting” and “laughable”.

With that in mind Southgate invited Rose to stand up in front of the other England players one night last week and talk about his views on racism in the sport. The meeting was called to discuss the possibility of racial abuse in Russia – and what, specifically, to do in that situation – but not even Southgate knew at that stage that Rose had, as a one-off, asked his family to stay at home.

“For the benefit of the other players I asked him to share his experiences,” Southgate said. “What was clear was that he felt let down by the authorities and that was sad to hear. He’s part of our team and part of our family. We intend to support our players as well as we possibly can, so it’s very sad. None of us know what is going to happen in Russia but, sadly, he thinks there’s the possibility of something happening that he wouldn’t want his family to experience.”

As he often does, Southgate spoke very eloquently on the subject, talking of the need for better education in the countries that have the worst problems but also recognising there were no easy answers and expressing his pride that he would be taking “one of the most diverse squads to have left England” into a World Cup.

“A lot of the players have children and our kids don’t think anything of who they talk to – people of all race, colour and religion,” Southgate, preparing for England’s final warm-up game against Costa Rica, said. “They are born into this world with no prejudice at all. It’s only when they put their beliefs on to them that their opinions can change. We’re victims in this world of prejudice, thinking that comes from others, and that’s very sad.

“The landscape has changed enormously in the 25 to 30 years I’ve been involved in the game. It’s not perfect but huge strides have been made. We can make some differences in football but we can’t affect everything because the problems are societal and football is a reflection of society.”

Would he encourage his players to walk off the pitch in Russia if they heard racial abuse? “In an idealistic world people would say to do that, but the realities of that are we would be thrown out of the tournament.

“Some people would say: ‘Well, you should still do that.’ But I don’t think the players would want that because they have worked all their lives to get to a World Cup. The idea is they want to raise and confront the issues, but they also want to play in the tournament.

“It’s a really difficult and delicate balance for us to get right and it’s impossible for me to say the things that would please everybody. But I think everybody knows how strongly I feel about the subject. The players are clear on where I stand and the support they have from me.”

[Lineker]

Quote

Speaking to the Evening Standard, Rose, who is expected to feature in England's final World Cup warm-up against Costa Rica on Thursday, said he had become "numb" to racial abuse and has "no faith" in football's authorities to challenge it.

He also revealed he told his family not to travel to the World Cup in Russia over fears of abuse.

The Russian Football Union was recently fined £22,000 for racist chants by fans in a friendly against France in March.

"If I'm racially abused out there, nothing is going to change," Rose said. "It shouldn't be like that but it is."

Rose added that he does not want to "worry for his family's safety", while preparing for his first World Cup.

"I've told my family I don't want them going out there because of racism and anything else that may ­happen," he said.

"My dad's really upset. I could hear it in his voice. He said he may never get a chance again to come and watch me in a World Cup.

"That was emotional, hearing that. It's really sad. It's just how it is. Somehow Russia got the World Cup and we have to get on with it."

Quote

“A £22,000 fine is disgusting,” he added. “What do they [Fifa] expect? I don’t want to sound arrogant but if I had been fined £22,000 - without sounding big-headed - it wouldn’t make a difference. A country being fined £22,000 is just laughable.”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/44385630

[Baddar]

Got Colombia and Brazil in the sweepstake I'm in. I've had far worse years.

[Colly]

8 hours ago, Lineker said:

Danny Rose has launched a pre-emptive strike against the inevitable racism

Bit early isn't it, could've waited another week to see when he's actually next playing at Stamford Bridge. 

[MDK]

http://www.newsweek.com/gay-men-kissing-russias-world-cup-will-be-reported-police-say-cossacks-962407

Quote

Gay Men Kissing At Russia's World Cup Will be Reported to Police, Say Cossacks

Men kissing each other in public will be reported to police at one of Russia’s cities that will host the World Cup, an ultra-conservative group has warned.

The world’s premier international soccer competition kicks off across 11 Russian cities next week, and the Kremlin has dismissed suggestions that the country’s restrictive laws would disrupt the flow of the tournament. But in the city of Rostov, members of the religious and traditionalist Cossack communities  enlisted to help authorities secure the stadiums say they will will also be on the lookout for acts of same-sex affection.

"If two men are kissing each other at the World Cup, we will tip off the police, drawing their attention to it and the rest is a police matter,” Oleg Barannikov, a head coordinator of the Cossack volunteers with the police told Radio Free Europe-affiliate Current Time. “To us, values mean the (Christian) Orthodox faith and the family come first.”

 

[Colly]

If I was in a World Cup squad all of my goal celebrations would be incredibly homoerotic. 

[MDK]

I'll get the baby oil

[Bobfoc]

The BBC website is showing full coverage of the England/Tunisia match from the 1998 World Cup, starting at 12pm. I forgot how much I liked the BBC theme tune for that tournament.

[Jimmy]

First of many bets. Sonny to score goal of the tournament - £1 at 101/1. 

I'm also getting very excited! It's a week today!! 

[MDK]

35 minutes ago, Bobfoc said:

The BBC website is showing full coverage of the England/Tunisia match from the 1998 World Cup, starting at 12pm. I forgot how much I liked the BBC theme tune for that tournament.

30 minutes in and we haven't scored. Southgate out.

[Adam]

57 minutes ago, MDK said:

30 minutes in and we haven't scored. Southgate out.

Bit harsh. 72 minutes in and this back 3 he's playing in has a clean sheet .

[MDK]

13 minutes ago, Adam es Tranquilo said:

Bit harsh. 72 minutes in and this back 3 he's playing in has a clean sheet .

Don't think much of this 3-5-2 formation either.

[Adam]

1 minute ago, MDK said:

Don't think much of this 3-5-2 formation either.

It's too progressive. I'm not sure it'll work in the brave new Millenium.

I don't think David Batty will either.