To the best of my (limited) knowledge, there were no stretchers brought out onto the field for last night’s world cup game. This is what happens when a media empire starts naming names, calling supposedly grown men to task for being babies. Let us all hope the Zero Baby Tolerance policy continues. Italy’s playing in the final, though, so that’s asking a lot. They are, by my reckoning, the third most shameless team of the world cup. And that’s saying a lot.
Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas
Words and pictures and stuff
Don’t tell Jer, but the Dodgers and Gigantes and around 2-1/2 games and 3 games back of the San Diego ballclub.
Whoops, previous post was by Pat but signature line auto-defaulted to CA.
Folks forwarded a nice e-mail from Aleksei Mitnikoff, remembering the USA’s fourth of July and 230th anniversary.
Still grown men diving. And I only watched the first half….
Yeah, didn’t bother to watch the game. Who really cares about France and Italy?
the French, and the Italians.
I cared about the Italians, and the Italians won!
Once the US and CZ were eliminated, I chose Italy as the team I favored, based on two very unscientific reasons. First, if Italy won the Cup, it meant that the US and CZ teams could well have been better than a lot of the other teams that advanced, but they just had the bad luck of being matched against a superior opponent in the round-robin. Second, a good friend is Italian, and I cheer for that team because he also cheers for it.
And contrary to expectation, it was not an Italian player but a French one that had an emotional outburst that cost the match. It’s OK to hit the ball with your head; it’s not OK to hit one of the opposing players, sending him to the ground. The goal scored on the resulting penalty kick changed the momentum of the game, allowing the Italians to win in the end.
Viva Italia!
Hi Jer,
You aren’t the only one offended by “dives, feigned injuries, and tantrums thrown”. The British office of Information Builders developed a data base on the subject:
http://www.informationbuilders.com/ontheball/index.html. Italy led the tournament in dives while France set the bar for not signing the national anthem.
a line of pain stretched
till stretchers waited for the
magic sponge to work
Thanks, Bob! although my gut says fake injuries were higher than these guys judged, perhaps they were more inclined to say, “Well, that might have hurt.”
On the other hand, they have Ghana for just two fake injuries, which is ridiculously low, as Ghana spent most of the second half of the game against the US lying on the grass, protecting their lead.
Quibbles with methodology aside, the stats do show Italy to be one of the most shameless teams in the tournament (and the US one of the least) so I’ll cite the information as reliable as long as it supports my baseless assertions.
Perhaps the French didn’t sign the national anthem because none of them were deaf?
Even though Italy was from the US group, I still can’t put them up with any other team in the tournament. At least by the way they played. Yea we could say the US was the only team to score on Italy until the last game, but we didn’t even do that.
I will give credit to the US on continue play even when hurt and not faking the injuries.
I
Unfortunately, that’s about all one can give the US team credit for.
It cheeses me even more when the team that is obviously better resorts to shenanigans which make the game less entertaining for the fans. These guys have completely forgotten why they are playing the game in the first place.
Except the US team, of course, who are asked daily, “why do you play that?”