This afternoon saw the first round of group games in World Cup 2010 draw to a close with Switzerland upsetting many people's favourites Spain. Hopefully this is the result that spurs underdogs to give it a go, and favourites to play more like favourites.
Opening day saw South Africa lose their inhibitions as the game wore on and take a point from their tie with Mexico, despite seeing little of the ball for long periods. As I write this, they take on a disappointing Uruguay, whose goal must surely be to let Diego Forlan see as much of the ball as possible-aside from him, they had little to offer against France in their scoreless draw. Looking at France, it isn't hard to see why Ireland ran them so close. There aren't many countries that can field so many talented players yet produce such insipid performances. Of course, team and squad selection plays a large part-Florent Malouda (who was arguably the most in-form French international over the past 6-12 months) started on the bench, and Karim Benzema (who despite a disappointing season in Spain must be capable of offering more in attack than the cumbersome Gignac) not included in the 23.
Getting out of the group could be the hard part for France-assuming they do (as group winners), and they could end up facing the Koreans, who took full advantage of Greeks bearing gifts last Saturday lunchtime. You would still bet on the French to make the quarter-finals assuming such a scenario comes to pass. Elsewhere in Korea's group, Argentina won (as expected), but weren't wholly convincing against Nigeria. A team that can close the Argentines down in midfield and deny Lionel Messi possession will fancy their chances against Maradona's men. Granted the Nigerian goalkeeper Enyeama was in inspired form, but Argentina are not set up to protect 1-0 leads.
England's group was dominated by 2 goalkeeping errors-each as bad as the next as Robert Green gifted the USA a point and Faouzi Chaouchi went one better and handed Slovenia their first World Cup win. Green's blunder was not the only story of the night of course-Ledley King hobbled off at half-time to be replaced by Jamie Carragher-who struggled to contain Jozy Altidore, and we saw Emile Heskey go clean through only to shoot straight at Tim Howard's chest. Both of these players were debatable squad selections-King's tournament may be over, and Heskey looks no closer to scoring his first international goal in over a year. Capello's insistence on not naming his keeper publicly until 2 hours before kick-off is hardly likely to have helped Green's state of mind-I don't really understand Capello's caginess-England don't have that many alternates that would force teams to change their plans at the last minute-so why not name your team and give your starting XI the chance to focus on the game?
England will likely be desperate to win their group and avoid Germany, who I will admit surprised me somewhat in thrashing Australia 4-0. To be fair, Australia were nearly as awful as Germany were good, and losing Tim Cahill to a ridiculous red card decision didn't help their cause. Germany were neat and in Mesut Ozil, have a nice 'No. 10' type player that will prove useful when they need to unlock more watertight defences later on in the tournament. Still, I won't back off my assessment of quarter finals at best for the Germans-their centre backs don't convince me, and despite the goals, their first choice front pairing exhibited the kind of form that saw them score a total of 9 goals between them for their clubs this season (Klose was particularly wasteful). Still, they were as good as we have seen thus far.
The Italians got away with it against Paraguay-a goalkeeping gaffe giving them a just about deserved point on Monday night. They perked up after the goal, but it will surely take the return of Andrea Pirlo to provide some more craft to fashion the sort of opportunities that were in short supply against Paraguay. None of this is liekly to bother the Italian at this point-their progress to the 2nd round is virtually certain after New Zealand's late equaliser against Slovakia, and no-one knows better than the Italians that tournaments are not won in the 1st week.
Holland were comfortable winners against Denmark, but didn't impress. Elsewhere, Portugal and the Ivory Coast settled for a share of the points, although the Sven Goran Eriksson's willingness to risk Didier Drogba for 20 minutes would suggest that he wanted to try and win it. Brazil scored 2 wonderful goals (well wonderful by the standards of what we have seen so far and wonderful if you assume Maicon's goal from an improbable angle was the result of skill rather than chance). My suspicions about Luis Fabiano were confirmed-if he can't do the business against North Korea, I would question whether he can do it against better opposition at this level. Still, Brazil have plenty of options from other positions for there goals so it may not be an issue. They didn't set the world alight last night, but I would suspect that they are in no hurry to do so.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment