He wishes. Still don't get why Liverpool ever let Alonso go.

How Chelsea-Arsenal ended without a red card is a mystery. Surprised Wenger and Mourinho weren't sent to the stands either, after their little tussle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juNStWCtp5g

Costa and Fabregas have to be the best signings of the summer.


Don't laugh, but apparently Benitez wanted to replace him with Gareth Barry, who never even went there in the end.

^^ i saw that push and it was hilarious. still, mourinho won on the pitch, the little fucker.

caught the chelsea/arsenal game in bits and pieces, and as usual (since i've been watching them) arsenal seemed to lack teeth. ozil pretty awful or am i wrong? terrible whenever i saw him anyway, losing balls like he had a repelling forcefield around him.

have no more brains left for west ham/ qpr. though i noticed rio ferdinand has been pretty heavily demoted. oh, 1-0! well congrats, hand or no hand.

I like Barry, I like him a lot, but would I have him above Alonso? Non.

Im looking forward to the MOTD highlights for the Chelsea game. Is there a chance they could do the double?

getting off the prem for a second here. how do you think the neymar-messi-suarez lineup is gonna work. im salivating at the prospect.... I know there's alot of ego there but they are all willing passers too. I can't believe Suarez's first game back is going to be against Madrid. The drama!

i think it's going to be insane, and most of the planet will want to watch

thanks for the reminder

oct 25?

Fuck those Ninjaz

dead don't fuck!



=======

la liga question:

real madrid #4 atlético de madrid #5

how come?

Madrid started the season pretty shakey actually. Lost a few games when they were incorporating new players. They seem to have hit some sort of stride now unfortunately. Atletico is just not the team it was last year. Still very good. But the loss of Costa, Courtois, and Luis (all to chelsea might a mention) has been tough to compensate for.

yeeeees! thank you. i remember some bits (dimaria's last-minute flight to man u) and others i hadn't noticed (e.g. courtois, filipe luis).

i should check out one of real madrid's CL games on replay just so i can see their new squad. atlético didn't do half bad vs. juve!

========

PS- I MISSED ROMA/JUVE!!!!! juve won 3-2. pirlo played!! oh man i should have tried to catch that.

God I hate the international break. No Prem for a week and the papers trying to find something interesting to say about games against San Marino and Estonia. Love the tournaments but these extended qualifiers are a joke.

i haven't checked to see what qualifiers are coming up but i'm sure there'll be something worth checking (not san marino).

speaking of estonia, i miss big countries for football-- yugoslavia used to be a respectable football power until they splintered and started exporting refugees. the soviets were more powerful than russia.

anyway, if you have netflix *online*, they have these "30 for 30" ESPN documentaries. i am in the middle of watching one called "soccer stories" that pieces together things like: chile in the 1974 qualifiers (playing in a stadium holding political prisoners undergoing torture), maradona '86 (the hand of god and everything else), the loughinisland massacre, and other stuff like that (it's 2+ hours of short films). check it out if you can while your qualifying group bores you.

Cheers. Don't have netflix but I'll see if I can find the Maradona one, especially.

The qualifiers have expanded, thanks to UEFA's stupid obsession with including more countries in the Euros and the CL. The unintentional result is it's now almost impossible for the bigger teams not to qualify. They know they can now afford to lose against each other, so long as they beat the minnows. If only Platini & co could embrace the 'if it aint broke' concept.

On a brighter note, Roy Keane's beard.

i had to google the shipwreck's name (i was familiar with his name but not with his whole story). now i see he played in that 1994 world cup of the halftime massacre.

the chile piece is great too. damn! some players were big allende supporters. fifa as usual doing their awful shit. extremely watchable.

Grantland has a great article about Meh-ssi

awesome. thanks. the link wasn't in the front page so i did a search & found 2! (2 recent ones). the latest one is great, the old videos are fantastic, excellent writing too.

http://grantland.com/?s=messi

Yeah, great article. Thanks. Feels weird that we're now talking about him almost retrospectively.

He's only bloody 27!

That's what I mean.

yes but

a) he's been playing top level for 10 years already, which for lesser players it's often a whole career (21-31 or whatever).

b) his reputation for indestructibility was finally put to rest-- messi does get injured. and yes he's not going to croak next year (knock on wood) but at some point his body will start veeery slowly crumbling. i mean look at ribéry at the moment.

c) assuming he pulls a totti/scholes, he could play for another 10 years, so this could be il mezzo del cammin for him-- not a bad time to evaluate your (professional) life if you go by dante.

d) the older we get the faster time passes so yes, it's been that long --- he's been playing 10 years for the senior barça team already. "but it was just yesterday!".

slovakia 1 spain 0 at halftime!

and a nice little skrtel/costa duel for bonus

don't miss

---

slovakia 2 spain 1

congrats slavo

Yeah, it's weird to be talking about a 27 year old retrospectively but, in Messi's case, strangely apt. He's clearly not (quite) as good as he was 3-4 years ago. That still means he's bloody amazing and only goes to show just how incredible he was a few years ago.

Hopefully, once the CRonaldo fanboys give up on their claims that he's a better player, the real question of where Messi stands amongst the all-time can begin. He's clearly the best player of his generation by some distance.

And it just shows how pointless games against San Marino are when England can beat them 5-0 and still look a bit shit. Didn't the Germans put 13 past them recently?

FUCK YES !!! That was the most euphoric match of our squad since 2010 when we beaten Italy 3-2 in the World Cup!

I think the whole country is going to get painfully drunk tonight. (i can't though, I'm on antibiotics).

Sorry, I just can't recover from yesterday's big win.



This is how we scored the 2nd goal in 85th minute.

Mourinho won't be pleased Costa played for 90 mins. He apparently has him sleep in bubblewrap in case of injury. Chelsea look fantastic and, on current form, they could win the Prem by a distance, but if anything happens to Costa, with only Drogba and Remy to fill in, it could easily go tits up.



And is it even any surprise that Costa isn't scoring for Spain? He plays in a similar formation at Chelsea that he played in at Atletico, and he's been great at both, but Spain will have to change their whole style if they're to get the best out of him - which, going on how they're playing right now, might not be such a bad idea.

that was amazing and we jumped on our seats. the first goal was great too, one could blame casillas for going on the wrong direction but that was a fantastically fast mule kick that swerved at the last fraction of a second. it was a really great shot.

some commentators on espn were blaming casillas for the defeat but casilas had some decent saves and i don't think the first goal was so easy to stop.


this is the first time that i really pay attention to him and he striked me as a real asshole.

and i need to watch chelsea carefully to compare. but he didn't strike me as playing tikikata like everyone else. speaking of tikitaka, iniesta had some really nice moments.

Because he isn't that sort of player. It's weird that he hasn't scored for Spain, especially as his playing with Fabergas really has been brilliant. I guess it's only a matter of time.

An asshole? Yeah he's clearly a guy brought on the mean streets, and he ain't never gonna back down from a fight, no matter who it is.

If as Demonrail hinted at, Costa stays injury free then Chelsea will win the league and he'll get player of the season. Easy.

Instead of Spain I watched the England game last night. More out of moral obligation than actual want.

You forget Schurlle. He's certainly more reliable than Drogba (r.i.p) and Remy.

exactly, but should he even need to be? i mean, what's wrong with a tikitaka balloon + 1 pointed knife blade at the end? that's how i used to see villa at barça before his broken leg.


he had some good chances but was either well-marked or he just missed. skrtel i thought was man-marking him and ha ha ha… oh...

i didn't see him as "not backing down" but more as a diva causing fights and taunting opposing players and just being a general asshole. there was a slovakian guy who grabbed him by the throat however and gave him a good shove and got away with it if i recall. that slovakian is the one who didn't back down from a fight! (it wasn't skrtel-- i think it was kucka). a most satisfactory response.


i need to watch him more because although i don't like the personality he projects on the pitch i haven't said i hate how he plays. i need to watch more prem matches for sure. i'm trying to negotiate some deal that might allow me to do that without suffering streams, but we'll see.

Landon Donovan's final USA game kicks of in five minutes.. reading jurgen's recent interview about how I wished donovan "could have done more" was a veiled insult or disguised confession of error in dissing lando at WC

Costa's more a pure striker than Viila, who would often be there as much to create space for Messi and/or Iniesta as to score goals himself. Costa's more in the vein of Ronaldo and Drogba so needs a very different kind of service. He's ideally suited to counterattacking teams like Chelsea rather than the possession-style more associated with Spain.


The taunting and provocation are part of his game and he knows all the tricks. He doesn't stray into the nastier territory reserved for the likes of Pepe so I don't really mind it.

I love this clip though. Seems to sum up what he's all about (besides scoring a shitload of goals, of course).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTeVf0I_JmA

EDIT: Completely unrelated but couldn't not ...

How has nobody mentioned Poland's won over Germany? Good on Poland. The commentator was making snidey comments about Poland's defence in the first half but I honestly didn't get why. Thy defended well, pretty much shut Germany down every time (especially Muller in the second half) and very much deserved a win.


This week has been the one week where I've predicted two long odds and not bet...well I never bet but still. The bets if anyone is interested was the exact minute for England's first goal and for Poland to win. If I'd put them on I'd never had to work again.

i didn't know! i have a listing for them to play ireland but that poland game wasn't shown anywhere that i know. aggghhhhh!!!

This week of qualifiers has been very interesting in terms of underdogs from the region I live in, beating clear favourites.

First, Slovakia defeated Spain, then our brothers from Czech Republic won in Turkey and now the Polish beat Germany.

Splendid.

But not Estonia. Better not be anyway!

Thankfully not, but we made hard work of it. We deserved the win but, against a pretty shit Estonia reduced to 10 men for much of the game, it should've been much easier than it was. But that's how England have been for as long as I can remember.

?

Yes i

Belarus - Slovakia 1-3

Hamsik scored 2 goals. At last he's equally valuable for the National team as he's been for Napoli for the last couple of years.

After 3 difficult matches (against Ukraine, Spain, Belarus), we have 9 points. Unbelievable so far.