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| “Messi is from Jupiter” – Nigeria coach Stephen Keshi |
The 16s now feature a head-to-head battle between the world's greatest soccer player and the world's greatest soccer name. Xherdan Shaqiri's hat trick gave the Swiss a 3:0 win over Honduras and advances them to play Messi's Argentina, which is potentially quite an interesting game. Shaqiri is the star of this new Swiss side, many of whom played for a World Junior championship team from several years ago. The spritely Swiss have a wonderful, youthful, almost naïve sort of quality to the way that they play, which got them into trouble v. France but has served them well otherwise. They should be intimidated by Messi & Co., but they might just be young enough not to know it. And Argentina's 3:2 win over the Super Eagles today didn't exactly assauge any doubts about their lack of defensive prowess.
2. Fly High, Super Eagles
Even though I think they are going to get smushed by France in the 16s, I would sort of like to see the Super Eagles win, and keep winning, and win the whole tournament, because every time that the Super Eagles win on the pitch, those who choose to commit unspeakable acts of violence within their country – piggybacking upon an event with as high a profile as the World Cup to raise their own profile in the process – will lose just a little bit more.
Let's have a few moments of noise ...
In no sport are coaches hired to be fired moreso than in soccer. But in the case of both Honduras and Iran, their managers quickly tendered their resignations upon being knocked out of the competition, even though it isn’t clear there was any real disappointment in their performance. In fact, I suspect both coaches – Fernando Suárez in Honduras, Carlos Queiroz in Iran – came to realize that it was time to move on simply because they had maxed out all they could accomplish.
Honduras were quite negative in their play in Brazil, and no one there is mourning their departure, but qualifying for a second consecutive World Cup was a notable achievement. Even so, this is a team whose best players are older and who possesses a rather straight forward game plan that isn’t particularly difficult for modern, sophisticated opponents to figure out. Replicating their success and reaching Russia in 2018 may be a taller order than Suárez wants to try to tackle. After you’ve overachieved twice, you’re no longer overachieving. At that point success is expected, sometimes unrealistically. Success often serves to set one up for future failure.
Queiroz leaving is definitely a blow to Iran. He was moments away from stealing a point from Argentina and they played Nigeria to a 0:0 draw. But playing to a 0:0 draw seemed to be all that they were capable of accomplishing, and having to chase a victory today v. the Bosnians wasn’t a recipe for success. Queiroz would argue, of course, that he didn’t really have the talent at his disposal to do more than assemble a stout, organized, ultra-defensive side. He also ran up against the usual Iranian problem – politics. Soccer is a game of the people in Iran, whose government is wary of anything which falls into the realm of the general public. National team success is good for national morale, but too much success encourages exceesive acts of free-expression – the football grounds being about the only true venue for such in the country. Authorities want the Meili to do well, but not too well. As such, Queiroz found his efforts underfinanced and undermined – stories circulated about how they didn’t have enough jerseys to be able to do the ceremonial swaps at the end of games – and international sanctions have crippled his ability to find quality warm-up opponents. There is only so long that you work under such conditions before you decide that you just don’t want to put up with it any longer.
The third team going home after today – Ecuador – needed a win today, but were decidedly underwhelming in a 0:0 game with a French team that made six changes and had nothing at all to play for. Ecuador is kind of like any number of teams you see every year in the NCAA basketball tournament, in that they have enough athleticism to get some results, but they don’t appear to do any faze of the game particularly well. They were playing with a burden in Brazil after the death of Christian Benítez, who was one of their best players. Enner Valencia admirably filled his role up front, scoring all three of Ecuador’s goals in the tourney. But La Tri really didn’t show very much. I thought they would be better than this.
3. Thinking back to yesterday
Uruguay are attempting to circle the wagons around Luis Suárez after his latest attempt at channeling his inner vampire. I can understand them publicly expressing defiance to some extent, since they know damn well that they’re going to everyone’s enemy come Saturday v. Colombia and are looking to hunker down and foster a bunker mentality. When thrust into the role of the villain, it’s often a wise idea to embrace it. But I find a lot of those comments too stupid to be believed, the best of which having been offered up by displaced team captain Diego Lugano, who apparently has grown tired of answering questions about why he got schooled by Costa Rica and has less mobility than a bag of wet sand. In keeping with the spirit of cannibalism, the Italians are now in the obligatory process of eating their own. Couldn’t happen to a better bunch, to be honest. The fact is that the Italians won a World Cup in 2006 with cynical play amid a domestic match-fixing scandal while fielding one of the least likable sides to ever claim the title. Questioning the commitment of the young players who may actually bring back some credibility to Serie A and make people care again about Italian football is certainly amusing. De Rossi and Buffon may as well tell those kids to take the soccer ball and get off their lawns while shaking their canes.
4. Thinking about tomorrow
This has been a bad few days for the Ghanians. Reports are that they went so far as to threaten a boycott of the game tomorrow v. Portugal over not being paid yet by the Ghana FA, at which point Ghana's president personally guaranteed the payments – and $3,000,000 in cash was promptly shipped to Brazil, while Ghana's FA asked for an advance on their share of the Brazil prize pool. A good rule of thumb when you hear about these disputes with federations is that the players are always right. No one has heard “the cheque is in the mail” quite as often as an African footballer. And the urgency to have this payment issue resolved almost certainly came about when The Telegraph in the U.K. broke this story over the weekend, in which it alleges that the president of Ghana's FA agreed on a figure of about £170,000 per match to have Ghanian sides participate in matches that would be fixed ahead of time by gamblers. Now, none of the players are implicated in this – it is something allegedly going on at an administrative level – but this guy is, in essence, your boss, and if you're a Black Star, why would you want to put up with this shit? The Black Stars need to beat Portugal tomorrow, and this sort of distraction certainly does not help.
5. Thinking about tomorrow some more
“The U.S. is known to give all they have in every single game, otherwise Mexico wouldn't be here.”
– Jurgen Klinsmann
Spoken like a true member of USA FC – speak to American pride and resiliency while also trolling El Tri a little. Nah, there isn’t be any sort of collusion going on in the Germany game.
