Monday, June 30, 2008

Finally

For those sport-haters, this will be my last sport post for some time to come.

These are my 2 pesos on Euro 2008:
1- More people supported Spain in the final than Germany. Now that we are all excited for their victory, time to take off the red shirts and go back support whatever crappy team you were supporting before. Of the 500 people I know, only one is a real Spain fan (keefak Nakhleh?), so stop being all Viva-Espana-ishy for now.
2- Italy's fans should stop complaining about losing in penalty kicks. Italy ALWAYS plays for penalty kicks, that's what they seek throughout the entire game. You deserve every loss you suffered with penalty kicks, lucky you got away with a world cup victory out of it (Damn you Trezeguet)
3- Whenever a team exits early in a big championship it's usually said, "we lost a championship but we didn't lose a team". This isn't true this time for Italy. They lost the all-defence team and it's time now to come up with a more interesting Italy, such team was last seen playing in the 1938 Mundial.
4- I have to admit that there was a strange sense of anti-Italism in the air. Let me explain it: people were afraid Italy would win this Euro, which would give the Italian supporters a chance to brag for ages that they were the most powerful. Such feelings were also observed against Brazil in 2006. Hopefully we'll see them against Argentina after 2010.
5- I'm glad Russia qualified instead of England. It's awful that France and Italy qualified instead of the Scotland. I think Scotland had a great team in the qualifications but they blew it against Georgia.
6- This is the championship of overconfidence. See, every team that was over-confident ended up losing big time. Italy were over-confident in the beginning so Holland killed them. Holland became so over-confident after the first round so they were crushed by the Russian. Meanwhile, the least confident of winning, the Spaniards, who were very suspicious of themselves winning a championship, ended up playing great and winning it.
7- This is an interesting trivia: in 1968, Italy played the USSR in the semi-finals.
They drew 0-0. Italy won the game with a toss of coin to make to the final, then win the championship. Again, toss of coin. All of sudden penalty kicks sound very fair.
8- Michel Paltini, who handled the Spaniards the Cup today, is the one who took the Cup away from them in 1984 with his marvelous performance, with France defeating Spain 2-0 in the final.
9- The UEFA should stop letting crappy teams host this Championship. Next one in 2012 will be hosted by Ukraine and Poland. They will automatically qualify to the finals and automatically be heads of their groups in the final. Shit!
10- The winner of this Euro is considered by the international community (or at least by me) as the third strongest team in the world, after Argentina and Brazil.

3 comments:

Maher said...

Italy are a disgrace to football!
about the 2006 wc shoot-outs!
(just a prove that italy were so damn lucky)
watch the shoot-outs again, you'll notice that buffon ma raa7 lal zawyeh nafs-ha not even once!

Anonymous said...

This is one of your best posts but I would like to clarify for the sake of historical correctness that Italy won the 1938 Cup due to the immense pressure by Mosolini and the Fascist Party. It was not the excitement flow of football. However, I think the Italy of 1970 was pretty much exciting as they let in 7 goals in their last two games agianst Germany and Brazil!

Hareega said...

maher... I still think Buffon is a great goalie, but the whole team is damn boring, I don't hate Italy particularly but this team is very very boring.

Batir... thank you for reading. I mentioned 1938 because I wasn't wathcing football then so I assumed that at these old times teams used to score goals at football games (when the average number of goals per game used to be 4-5). Italy actually wasn't bad in 1970 and their semi-final against Germany was wonderful, hopefully they'll learn from it that they can attack and still win!