World Cup Final 2010 : Netherlands vs Spain

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/48320000/jpg/_48320327_009777749-1.jpg

Who do you think will win?

I'm no octopus but I'm sayin Spain

Spain.

But it makes a terrific change, really, to have a world cup final where either team would be a cheering winner; the opposite, for me, of eg 1990.

i was quite happy with those 2 teams in the 1990 final (shame it was a shit game mind)

But a new winner is exciting. I do feel it will be a case of first goal the winner. The dutch are quite defensive this tournament compared to what they are usually. And Spain aren't exactly gonna attack for 90s mins either.

Prediction: 1-0 to Spain. I'm not really too bothered either way, but I think I'll start off cheering the Dutch (but pretending it's the Euro 2008 version, who really were worth watching).

Fun facts:

- first final ever not to feature Brazil, Argentina, Italy or Germany
- Holland are aiming for a 100% record through qualifiers and tournament
- 17 of the players in the two squads were youth players at either Ajax or Barcelona

Not only it is the World Cup final, the game also sees the Netherlands defend their Unofficial Football World Champion title.

I was wondering about that! Assumed Spain would be holders tbh

- 17 of the players in the two squads were youth players at either Ajax or Barcelona

― Ismael Klata, Sunday, July 11, 2010 4:35 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

Yeah, amazing. That's like 1/3 of the combined squads!

Picked Holland before the tournament so gonna have to stick with them. But tbh I'd quite like Spain to win it. Much like last time when Italy were my pick but by the time the Final came round was rooting so hard for Zizou that I was crushed when France lost.

I want to see a game where Spain score early to see how a match unfurls from there. Holland reacted well to going behind against Brazil and I'd like to see how expansive Spain could become faced with a team attacking against them.

I think a Spain goal first would be the best thing for the final. The Dutch couldn't just sit back & defend then.

i think germany will win

Anyone watching the ceremony? Just seen some elephants on the pitch and now some african lady is singing

God no.

Shakira again etc
http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/photo/photolist.html#1272547

Don't! It's atrocious, of course. xp

2-1 Holland

Your first word got deleted accidentally: "Spain 2-1 Holland"

"on behalf of the president and the whole of South-Africa, thank you to all our new friends"

Yeah, in two hours you're that country we never hear about in that continent down there again. Enjoy it while it lasts.

It will be 1-0, but who knows to.

There he is, Nelson Mandela being driven onto the pitch on a golf cart

did fifa put the same pressure on him that was exerted on Ronaldo in 98?

Waved to the crowd for a couple of minutes and then left again. His health isn't very good anymore (hence: no speech or anything) and he's not able to watch the match, the Dutch pundit said here.

Dutch TV has Joeri Mulder and Louis Van Gaal in their in-stadium studio.

I saw Mandela speak in Trafalgar Square three or four years ago. He was introduced by June Sarpong, and followed by Jamelia :(

Spain to win I think, which would make me happy. Don't like this Holland side much, Robben and Sneider aside.

That. I wanna see Spain prove their dominance and pass their way into history.

Unchanged teams btw apparently - Torres starts on bench.

Concerns about Villa playing centrally aside, Pedro played very well on Wednesday, bar that ridiculous 2 on 1, and if a change is needed Torres is still there. I don't expect him to make a mercurial improvement just cos it's the final tho.

Yeah, Robben and Sneijder are the two things I like about Holland, for them alone I'd be OK with them winning, but I can't see past Spain (also, have money on them).

xposts

I'm a little ticked off at that free kick vs. Brazil that's been given as Sneijder's goal, makes a bit of a farce of the Golden Boot imo

I want the team who plays the best to win. No refereeing crap, no diving, like the match yesterday.

eep i gotta get across town!

Will be slightly disappointed if there's no refereeing crap and no diving.

Yeah, Robben and Sneijder are the two things I like about Holland

agreed

The city of Amsterdam has announced it is now completely full.

my system predicts spain, which i'm happy with. but i'd be happy with holland. i just hope it's a decent game. not long to go now.

Don't remember much of 2006 except the Butt that Launched a Thousand Gifs, but sometimes in a final a moment like that is plenty.

Dutch TV pundit audibly tearing up as the players enter the pitch for their warm-up.

Nice piece on ITV just now with Chiles, Southgate and Townsend being shown around a church which played a part in some of the worst violence in Soweto. Respectful and interesting and approx 10102024 times better than "Alan Shearer tackles apartheid".

Zidane had a great header & Buffon made a flying save a couple of minutes before the craziness. If he'd scored he'd be on his own at the top of the all-time list imo

There isn't a joke goes by on the bbc without Shearer filling in the punchline to show he got it too

Am controversially thinking of sticking with ITV, at least for the build-up. Chiles' irreverance is more fun than the earnest bollocks over on the Beeb.

Who's commentating on both? Mowbray/Lawro and Tyldesley/Beglin? If Craig Burley is on dis ting, I'm on dat other ting.

Lawro sounded in good humour on the radio this afternoon. I cannot put myself thru Tyldesley in any circumstance, and if nothing else I find Mowbray easier to tune out. Fiver for anybody who watches the whole match with the alternative Chris Moyles commentary.

The next pundit I hear who misuses the phrase "Total Football" is gonna be on my Raoul Moat list tho.

Desmond Tutu, Jacques Rogge, Kofi Annan, loads of celebs are there (Platini doesn't look like he's been in a hospital at all)

Dutch NOS is interviewing the Spanish queen! (diplomatic "Whatever happens, both teams are wonderful, etc")

Rooting for the Dutch, but I don't know enough about the game or the teams to actually make a prediction. This --

I want the team who plays the best to win. No refereeing crap, no diving, like the match yesterday.

― StanM, Sunday, July 11, 2010 12:39 PM (16 minutes ago)

-- is extra-OTM.

Dutch NOS is interviewing the Spanish queen! <- in front of the wall with sponsor logos, where they also interview the players and the coach. Vv weird.

Seat of honor should have been given to El Pulpo Paul, just to see his calm regard of the game.

ah been done : /

Ah becker did was comment on the epic battle with teh U R U GUAYS. It's easily mistranslated

England have moved up in the FIFA world rankings thanks to their thrilling WC campaign.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_cup_2010/8818696.stm

o that blatter

"No way is Capello's team of wannabes the seventh best team in the land"
johnmclain

Not quite grasping the idea of world rankings on Have Your Say

"No way is Capello's team of wannabes the seventh best team in the land"

1. Chelsea
2. Man U
3. Arsenal
4. Tottenham
5. Man City
6. Villa
7. Capello's team of wannabes
8. Liverpool

Looks about right to me.

disagree with city's placing so high tbh

what with having g barry as a first team player and all

Seems harsh on world cup winners Liverpool

Sorry to get all HYS, but how exactly did england go up to 7th? I thought it might have been that we've lost less points than teams that were above us, but no, it seems we've gained 57 points in the last month. Wah?

Oh hang on, is it just that Portugal and France did even shitter than us, so we just moved on up?

Portugal and Italy were above England and dropped down. Not quite sure what makes Portugal worse than England though, poor qualifying record presumably.

Probably that England managed one win against a team who weren't the worst ranked in the world cup?

Although I suppose draw v Brazil may counter that.

Issuing official world rankings three days after the world cup final is a bit like that Times music critic in 1964 who said The Beatles were quite good

official world rankings, how does it work

loooooooooool wtf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii387pzvyD0&feature=player_embedded

wtf

someone pls provide some background to that

background = 12 hours drinking

then random gobs on dudes during a televised parade? gotta be more to it than that- who's the gobbee? what's he done to pique? why is fabregas such a dislikeable little shit?

is this something to do with barca DNA?

someone pls provide some background

is fabregas wiping a prior loogie off of valdes back at the beginning?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1294627/Gerard-Pique-spits-Spanish-official.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

"the unsuspecting victim, believed to be Pedro Cortes, director of the Spanish football federation."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/a/arsenal/8818862.stm

I like this better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIagdOe60x4&feature=player_embedded#!

Not only it is the World Cup final, the game also sees the Netherlands defend their Unofficial Football World Champion title.

― James Mitchell, Sunday, 11 July 2010 18:45 (5 days ago)

Woah crazy, not one of the eleven UFWC title defenders in World Cup finals has managed to keep the title! That's, what, 1/20 of a percent chance, if we assume finalists are approximately evenly matched? Damn.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_USzog_GOzyA/SqBpZTWAPsI/AAAAAAAAMDU/rrvJgNtpVFs/s400/lose.jpg

Book review:
Why England Lose or Soccernomics (title seems to differ by country)
Simon Kuper & Stefan Szymanski

This was mentioned a few weeks back, so I checked it out. It's a kind of pop-economics approach to football, covering four broad areas:
- a micro view of clubs as a business
- an analysis of how certain competitions have developed and why
- how supporters behave
- the international game

They use some statistics in support of their arguments, but mostly the approach is theory with anecdotes. The problem is that it hasn't been done very rigorously. International performance is assessed using win percentage, for example, so Spain are shown massively improving in the last two decades - but there's no mention in this context of politics having dumped a dozen or more weak teams into UEFA since 1990, when it seems obvious that anyone decent should now be guaranteed winning a quarter of their games, which wasn't the case before. Some stats are obviously just made up, like the proof as to which is the sportiest nation on earth.

That said, some uses of statistics struck me as really clever, like using wage bills to identify racism in the English game (if black players are discriminated against, they will get paid less - hence look at pairs of clubs with similar wage bills - if the one with more black players achieves higher, that's proof of racism - shows it was prevalent up until about 1990, before fading out). And the anecdotal stuff can be really good, like the chapter on penalty technique and game theory. Ultimately, though, there simply aren't enough of either - you never find out which clubs were the racist ones or equality pioneers, you don't know how selective the stats were, and the anecdotes seem thin because you can always think of a counter-example.

Stylistically as well, it's a bit of a mess. When the point is to overturn received wisdom, it's really annoying to find exactly that in non-football areas. Every mention of Iceland is immediately followed by reference to a collapsed economy (wealth strongly correlating with performance) - maybe they are starving in Reykjavik now, though I doubt it. That gag is even made twice in one paragraph, infuriatingly.

In summary, it's interesting enough, but not really very good. It's a shame, because I think that the idea is terrific - football is such a huge and colourful subject that there must be a test for every variable and an interesting anecdote to match, so you could write something that is entertaining while also going pretty deep. But this isn't it.

I've been reading that, too. Don't understand the logic behind counting a draw as 'half a win', though, in some of the stats at the beginning of the book. Am I being thick?

I suppose it makes as much sense as anything (draw as one-third of a win might've made equal sense) - it's just another thing that's never explained. For a book which is trying to debunk myths through numbers, using such loose starting-points makes it all seem rather slack.

That said, I really liked a lot of the conclusions, they mostly make intuitive sense. It just feels like you have to take them on faith more than you should - not a problem for me as I think about the game a lot myself anyway, but seems less ideal for those with a casual interest, which is who the book is presumably aimed at.

I watched the Man Utd-Chelsea shootout on Youtube after reading that chapter on penalties/game theory. Fascinating stuff.

Any other good football books? I read Inverting The Pyramid but must admit, as interesting as it was, I kind of wanted to just read about the tactics and not about some dude who invented them.

I'm trying to get onto a bit of a roll at the moment - started Jonathan Wilson's new book, The Anatomy of England, last night after I finished that one. I didn't get very far - I was knackered and really had to go to sleep - but it had me gripped immediately. He just writes so much better. I only read the prologue and a bit of the first chapter but it's of a totally different order in quality. The way he mixes personal experiences (his own and others') with tightly-edited facts from lots of different sources make it so much more entertaining and easier to read than Why England Lose, even though it's much denser and probably more difficult.

It's almost totally historical though - the idea being that ten famous international games from 1929 to 2007 each reveal lessons about the English game - so might not be what you're after.

I'll give that a go, thanks. Futebol: The Brazilian Way Of Life by Alex Bellos is supposed to be really good. I've had it on my shelf for ages but still haven't got round to reading it.

I've never really been able to get into books on foreign football cultures for some reason, at least not since I was little and read things about the really big stars. I have ones on German footy and this encyclopaedic thing on the global game, but never tempted to open them. I just ordered one on the development of soccer in the US, hopefully with loads of stuff on the early days when it was a big sport - with any luck that'll break the jam.

i liked The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro. i think i spelled that right. it's more of a personal story, but it gives pretty good insight into lower-league italian football and what it can mean to a small community.

Ismael, what's the US book?

Soccer In A Football World by David Wangerin. Have you read it? Can't remember where I heard about it - you are a likely suspect, come to think!

Nope, never heard of it until now. I'll definitely be tracking down a copy, though.

"Just bringing boys and girls together, organising schooling and health education, providing the tools to fight poverty and disease – that is the legacy we want to leave," said Sepp Blatter at the start of the World Cup. But one week after it finished, legacy-seeking press focus has stayed on Fifa's other big win: its estimated £2bn tax-free profit.

The latest stories around the ethical set-up of the tournament concern the already controversial Jabulani ball. It was written off as "inadequate" by Gianluigi Buffon, and Robinho said: "The guy that designed it never played football." But the aerodynamics probably weren't top priority for Pakistani workers stitching for Adidas, being paid less than £1.85 a day, say the International Labour Rights Forum. That's less than £50 a month.

Reports about the ball follow similar stories surrounding official replicas of the World Cup mascot, Zakumi, produced in China with factory workers earning £1.90 a day, while Nike had its World Cup replica kits made by workers in Jakarta, paid £3 a day.

"'The World Cup succeeded in highlighting many of the positive aspects of the African continent," says Will Prochaska, director of Alive & Kicking, a charity making balls in Africa in Fairtrade conditions. "But if Fifa had decided to run the tournament ethically instead, by supplying balls and merchandise from African businesses and social enterprises, then it could have saved itself the hassle of its legacy programme because the tournament would have helped generate a considerable socioeconomic boost to the region by itself."

Media focus remains, too, on the fallout from stringent laws Fifa required South Africa to pass preventing locals from producing products related to the tournament. Fifa lawyers warned: "Those attempting to benefit from the publicity surrounding the 2010 Fifa World Cup without paying sponsorship fees could land themselves in very hot water" – and were true to their word.

One "ambush marketing" case involved a lollipop maker being dragged through the courts for calling a sweet "The 2010 Pop", while, as reported last week, a Port Elizabeth bar owner was threatened with a £4,500 fine for putting up posters reading "The Phoenix Hotel and Stage Door pub welcomes the world to the World Cup". A restaurant owner, meanwhile, was threatened with jail for writing "2010" on a football and putting it in his window. "They tried to take advantage," Fifa said.

stringent laws Fifa required South Africa to pass preventing locals from producing products related to the tournament

Do you know any more about this? I couldn't understand what those dutch girls in the beer outfits were up in court for - I mean, what country has criminal laws against wearing things with adverts on them? Would be interested in knowing what FIFA's hosting requirements actually are.

dunno, i just c&p the guardian article about cunty fifa.

they have an 'exclusion zone' that goes for a couple hundred yards or something (maybe more i cant recall) around every WC stadium where it's prohibited to display/advertise/think about undesignated FIFA partners or something.

The funny thing is that under the FIFA Special Measures Act the commercial display areas inside and outside the stadiums and the official FIFA Fan Parks could only sell products of the official FIFA sponsors Budweiser, McDonald's and the rest, but the corporate hospitality suites inside the stadiums could serve whatever the fuck brands they wanted.

Would have loved to have seen Bill Clinton and Mick Jagger tucking into a pre-match Bud Light and Fillet O'Fish each.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/8849972.stm

The French Football Federation has suspended all 23 members of France's World Cup squad for their next game.

should have just sat them all at the centre circle at half time to tell them off?

Stay classy, FIFA.

http://www.dagbladet.no/2010/08/14/nyheter/fifa/billetter/svartebors/12953681/

Dagbladet can reveal that confidential lists with personal data concerning at least 60 000 ticket holders has been sold on the black market — by a trusted employee in the FIFA system.

The lists Dagbladet is in possession of contain the full name, date of birth and passport number of the unknowing ticket buyers — as well as detailed information about which games they had tickets to, and where they were seated.

Oh, Bellend:

Sepp Blatter says Fifa is considering scrapping draws at the group stage of future World Cup finals by introducing penalty shoot-outs after 90 minutes.

Aw look Blatter, can't you just let one of us look after this thing? You can still go to the banquets and everything.

Someone stop him. Please.

all that'd do is force overmatched and/or offensively challenged teams to lay back all match to force a 0-0 draw and go to penalties.