European Football Thread

[minionofmidas]

England ties Isreal today


How long until McClaren is booted?

I haven't seen the press reaction today, but I'd suggest (despite the very poor results to date) that he will hold on until the end of this qualification run (or as long as England have a reasonable chance of qualification).

About three more games, then?

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I saw the last sixty minutes of that game, then I saw all of Lithuania vs France afterwards. Ireland vs Wales was several times more entertaining than that really lacklustre game.

[minionofmidas]

Ireland 1-0 Slovakia

Much better performance than the last few games. Keeps a tiny little bit of hope alive for qualification.

N Ireland 2-1 Sweden

Amazing first goal by Healy.
Amazing result.
NI top of the group with some serious teams in it.
Lawrie Sanchez is a miracle worker.

Amazing second goal by Healy. You forgot to mention that.

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I sort of went through all the groups and predicted who'd come through, based on standings so far, and then noticed with a shock that I had just predicted a Euro without British Isles participation... after two very close calls against British teams (plus two more who still have a decent chance) ... but the really shocking part is, the second most likely scenario is that the British Isles will be represented by Northern Ireland only.

[minionofmidas]

Looks pretty good.

[minionofmidas]

Manchester United (SCO)

Chelsea (NIR)

Have there been major border redrawings that I missed?

With Scotland having Manchester and Northern Ireland taking London, does England still exist?

Gee, you should follow the news more closely. Chelsea have relocated to Belfast.
The Scottish-English border was moved to the Trent in exchange for the release of 15 English soldiers by Scottish authorities.

[minionofmidas]

When does NFL Europe start?

Its actually NFL Germany + Amsterdam ...

PS: It starts next Saturday, April 14.

Seriously though, how popular is it over there?

American football? Let me put it like this. I've never met, seen nor even heard of anyone who plays it anywhere in Europe.

Have you ever watched it yourself? The main problem that most Americans seem to have with soccer is that it doesn't have enough offense. Americans love high scoring games...maybe soccer should play with no goalie or one of the players drops back to goalie.

I've seen it on American movies...and I've played a little rugby. The problem is that it seems to one-dimensional. It's just people running into each other trying to get a ball a certain distance. Now, soccer is much more tactical and refined.

Actually the playbooks of both the defense and offense are very complicated with quite often hundreds of unique plays per side per team.

Exactly. The game is so retarded and untactical (compared to soccer) that it can actually be broken down into repeatable situations like that - although granted there's quite a lot of them.
Of course, the whole bit about the breaks ties in here as well. If you scratched the play on rule and bookings for "tactical fouls" in soccer, it'd probably degenerate AF-like (except with even fewer goals than now) pretty quickly.

and NFL Europe is horrible

NFL Europe is basically a farm league of the NFL's, so of course you'd expect lower quality playing, wouldn't you?

Have you ever watched it yourself? The main problem that most Americans seem to have with soccer is that it doesn't have enough offense. Americans love high scoring games...maybe soccer should play with no goalie or one of the players drops back to goalie.

I know you're being tongue in cheek here, but to a lot of people that actually is the "beauty" of football/soccer. The emotional investment that goes into scoring a goal, and when your team does score it's just f***ing beautiful. Seriously, nothing can compare to the feeling of being in a stadium and going wild with thousands of other fans when your team scores. It wouldn't be the same if there was a goal every other minute.

Yeah. A goal is better than sex.

[minionofmidas]

YES! Bayern are out.

[minionofmidas]

German cup semifinals coming up.
Tuesday Nuremberg vs us (I'm going!)
Wednesday Wolfsburg vs Stuttgart.

If we win and Stuttgart wins, we're back in Europe. Well not technically yet, but Stuttgart would have to take a maximum of 2 points from the remaining five games to drop to sixth place - and even that only if Leverkusen wins everything and Nuremberg wins everything except their upcoming away game to Leverkusen. So we'd probably be officially back in Europe by next weekend.

[minionofmidas]

German cup semifinals coming up.
Tuesday Nuremberg vs us (I'm going!)
Wednesday Wolfsburg vs Stuttgart.

If we win and Stuttgart wins, we're back in Europe.

That didn't go too well...

[minionofmidas]

Well... the game has just finished, Milan played better, but what in the hell is the deal with the referee ending the game before MINIMUM stoppage had passed? Benitez has good reason to ask for an explanation.

No such thing as "minimum stoppage". Nor anything unusual, at least in the Bundesliga, about the game ending up to 30 seconds before the referee's earlier estimate of how much he'll grant. (Which is all that figure on the sign is.)

[minionofmidas]

AC Milan doesn't deserve to be in competition this year.

Strongly agree.

This year, despite all the star power, has been a poor year for English clubs (even if you're a Man Utd. fan) I think next year will be a million times better.

Strongly disagree.
Liverpool, Chelsea and Man United made the Semi Finals of the Champion's League. This can't be brushed off as poor.

I agree that we did well in the Champions league, but we lost, and the Prem was boring this year, only two teams ever has a shot, Arsenal wasn't competitive, Liverpool stopped caring many weeks before the end (try Christmas) and West Ham cheated and no justice was done.

The Premier League (the championship that is, not relegation etc) has not been entertaining since... well ... since it has been the Premier League.
Not that Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1, Primera División etc are any better.

[minionofmidas]

Representation of European Nations in first full round of European Cups (CL+UEFA), assuming Sevilla doesn't slip up against AEK (game was postponed for a week. In case of a sensation, Spain is 3+5 and Greece is 2+4):

Scotland 2 + 1
England 4 + 4
Netherlands 1 + 5
Belgium 0 + 3
France 2 + 5
Spain 4 + 4
Portugal 3 + 4
Norway 1 + 2
Sweden 0 + 5
Finland 0 + 1
Denmark 0 + 4
Germany 3 + 4
Switzerland 0 + 3
Austria 0 + 3
Italy 4 + 4
Poland 0 + 1
Czech Republic 1 + 2
Slovakia 0 + 1
Croatia 0 + 1
Bosnia 0 + 1
Serbia 0 + 1
Macedonia 0 + 1
Greece 1 + 4
Turkey 2 + 2
Cyprus 0 + 1
Israel 0 + 1
Bulgaria 0 + 3
Romania 1 + 2
Ukraine 2 + 2
Belarus 0 + 1
Russia 1 + 3

[minionofmidas]

Basically confirming what we already know.. the leagues outside the big five or so in Western Europe continue to get shafted.

Big Six. Portugal counts.

[minionofmidas]

Basically confirming what we already know.. the leagues outside the big five or so in Western Europe continue to get shafted.

The system for determining places can be unfair as it zooms in one one season and if you'r country performs poorly that season it relects that in the few seasons afterwards. It happened to Scotland last time round I'm pleased we secured two Champions League spots and on recent form, we should hold them.

Look forward to seeing this as a regular occurance in Rangers' and Celtic's Away Champions league Group Schedule

Scottish Away Matches
Played - 6 Won - 0 Drew - 0 Lost - 6 Points - 0



But I wanted Red Star to win. And Lewis, Portugal is just living of FC Mourinho's former glory once that goes off the UEFA points (alright, co-efficients) then...

And on the fact that there's no difference between fourth and sixth place. Of course, look at Romania's recent jumps... this year's qualification stages show very well that the country doesn't have more than three clubs able of competing... however well those three have recently done.

[minionofmidas]

Basically confirming what we already know.. the leagues outside the big five or so in Western Europe continue to get shafted.

I don't really think it's right to blame the big leagues for their success. It certainly isn't their fault that... for example, the Irish leagues...are hopeless.

Nyes. The exact rules on how many clubs can start depending on a country's coefficient were made up after the hierarchy of leagues developped after all.

[minionofmidas]

I fell asleep watching Germany-Wales.

[minionofmidas]

ONE- NIL!!!!!!

Yeah, just saw that. Knock those sore losers out, will ya.

[minionofmidas]

England seem to have found their stride just in time as well.

[minionofmidas]

Id gladly hire you as Ireland manager.

[minionofmidas]

Anybody else seen the Scotland vs Italy game?

Pre-game situation: It's Scotland's last game. If Italy wins, Italy and France qualify. To get to my personally preferred outcome of Italy and Scotland qualifying, Scotland would need at least a draw and France would have to lose their last game against Ukraine on wednesday. (And Italy need to win their last match against Andorra wednesday, but that's a formality.) Scotland winning today and France at least drawing their last game gives us Scotland and France. I forget what happens if this game draws and France doesn't lose. Not that it matters as things turned out.

Synopsis of important situations during the game:
2nd minute: Italy go up 1-0.
17th or so minute: Scots want a penalty for hand play, which isn't granted, probably correctly all things told.
30th or so minute: Italy go up 2-0. The linesman claims to have seen an offside position somewhere. No one knows how he came up with that - at no point during the entire scene was any Italian behind the last Scottish defender. No goal.
65th minute: Scotland equalize. This was actually offside, though hard to see.
Injury time: Italy, who by now seem happy enough with the draw actually, get awarded a highly dubious free kick that leads to them going up 2-1.

Synopsis on German tv (three hours after the game), in chronological order:
Weeping Scotland fans.
Scottish players coming out again 15 minutes after the game.
Endless harping on the strange free kick.
Italian 2-1
More harping on the strange free kick, complete with short excerpts from interviews and a castaway remark about how Italy "always" seem to have that kind of luck.
Italian 1-0.
The handplay scene - they admitted it wasn't really a penalty, I'll grant 'em that.
The game's best chance besides the goals (for Scotland, in the 45th minute)
Scotland's 1-1, shown from an angle where you couldn't guess the offside unless you knew about it beforehand, with no mention of offside.
Italian 2-1 again.
Some sanctimonious words about how success might cool tempers in Italy - as if club tifosi cared about the national team. Especially when there's more important issues around. As if the police should be allowed to get away with murder (literally, in case you haven't heard). Now that's when I really blew my top.
(Notice they left out the incorrectly called off Italian goal entirely.)

I dunno if this is really just lazyness (and maybe disappointment that Scotland didn't make it. Something I can sympathize with 100%. They deserved it.) or still sour grapes about losing the World Cup semifinal or whatever, but either way I'd like to see some heads rolling. Which won't happen of course.

[minionofmidas]

I nominate my cat. She's been dead for two years now, but she would still do a better job than Mr Really Really Really Bad Combover.

What about a deck chair? Deck chair for England manager!

The deck chair should be put in goal. It'll do a better service there than the dead cat, and about average for a post-Seaman England keeper.

[minionofmidas]

Mourinho has said no. Ah well. O'Neill also, but then I always thought he was a little overrated.

Apparently, Klinsmann has now entered the frey. This could get interesting...

Ah, I wondered when that name'd get mentioned here. Obviously, the idea was foremost at every silly German sports journalist's mind the moment... well, the moment England first looked in trouble actually.

[minionofmidas]

Only winners qualify.. and the worst placed runner up is out without a play-off. Knowing our luck that would be us.

No. I'm almost 100% sure that that will be Scotland.

[minionofmidas]

And for the Euro 2008 I´m not very optimistic either.

Why? You think there's a chance the UEFA might get hip to the fact that there are no eleven different Austrian footballers anymore, and strike you from the list of participants?

[minionofmidas]

Go Aberdeen!

[minionofmidas]

Tomorrow's the big day - tomorrow will be the day I've been waiting for all year, and that has seemed so tantalizingly close several times - tomorrow Bayern will be finally eliminated from the UEFA Cup!