World Cup 2010 Blog: “Soundoff: Your World Cup Group G Predictions…” plus 9 more |  |
- Soundoff: Your World Cup Group G Predictions…
- Daily Dose: June 8th, 2010 – Best XI of All Time?
- Nothing Says World Cup Like Gratuitous Nudity
- Soundoff: Who Will Win FIFA’s Young Player Award?
- The World Cup Of Hearing Damage
- It’s Spain’s World, We’re Just Livin’ In It.
- Predicting the World Cup Using Counterfeit Soccer Shirt Sales
- Khalid Boulahrouz Gets Punk’d, Ryan Babel Dances.
- Trying To Find The Common Denominator; Or: The Curse of the Premier League Trophy.
- Soundoff: Which Injured Star Will You Miss Most at World Cup 2010?
| Soundoff: Your World Cup Group G Predictions… Posted: 08 Jun 2010 11:40 PM PDT
So, to recap (even though we’re only two paragraphs in) the Group G teams are: Brazil, Cote d’Ivoire (aka Ivory Coast), North Korea and Portugal. I’m going to open confidently by picking first and last place: Brazil will win the group. Portugal and Cote d’Ivoire are strong teams, but Brazil is better than both in every area of the field. Especially in defence. ESPN’s Tommy Smyth disagrees, and is actually predicting Brazil to finish third in this group. Which is possibly part of the reason why Tommy Smyth has been relegated from TV to radio coverage this year. So ignore him. Brazil will finish first in Group G. North Korea will finish last. I confess I don’t know much about them. But what I do know is that they are not as good at football as any of the other three teams in Group F. I’m not necessarily predicting three spankings. But I am predicting at least two defeats, maybe one heroic 0-0 draw, but definitely a last place finish. Which leaves Portugal and Cote d’Ivoire fighting for second place behind Brazil. The big news for Cote d’Ivoire is obviously Didier Drogba’s injury. My thinking is that while an injured Drogba would be a big miss, it would also be an opportunity for other talented Elephants to take the spotlight. Salomon Kalou, for example, might revel in being the main man up front rather than being Didier’s sidekick. The bigger problem I see – and what I suspect will actually happen – is that Drogba will play injured, and below par, and so the team will play below par. Which brings us on to Portugal… Have you noticed how quiet Cristiano Ronaldo has been lately? By his standards this has been a hush hush World Cup build up. I’m taking that as a positive sign, and suspect Ronaldo will start this tournament with a bang. Which is why I predict the final Group F table will look like this: 1. Brazil That’s my prediction. What’s yours? - Also, don’t forget, you have just two days left to enter our World Cup Bracket competition.
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| Daily Dose: June 8th, 2010 – Best XI of All Time? Posted: 08 Jun 2010 09:56 PM PDT Possibly the best eleven of all time. With dramatic music.
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| Nothing Says World Cup Like Gratuitous Nudity Posted: 08 Jun 2010 08:16 PM PDT
No sooner than the football takes hold of our hearts and minds, the traveling art of the World Cup, the ladies, will garner attention from another area of the body…the eyes, obviously. This makes the day Sweden was knocked out of World Cup contention the saddest day in recent football history, yet we shall trudge on, fighting the good fight – perhaps the easiest fight of them all. Thus we have models bodypainted in the colors and flags of their respective countries – the bigger countries, at least, and not for the first time. The models are very much NSFW, while the artist’s sketchy mullet isn’t safe for anything.
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| Soundoff: Who Will Win FIFA’s Young Player Award? Posted: 08 Jun 2010 03:54 PM PDT
That’s Lukas Podolski, the last – and technically only – recipient of the FIFA Young Player Award at a World Cup. Since the last World Cup back home he’s seen his stock drop further than the Lehmann Brothers at club level while still scoring goals galore for country. So perhaps this award is as cursed as the Premiership’s very own big ears. FIFA’s Young Player Award “is given to the best player in the tournament who is at most 21 years old”. The age is actually a slight problem, since so few teams actually call up numerous players 21 or under, much less run them out onto the pitch for extended periods. The candidates: Carlos Vela, Mexico * – Will turn 22 during the tournament. And yet with a list so deep, the answer is easy: Mesut Ozil. First, a little known fact about Mesut: he’s actually the best thing since the advent of breathing. Skillful, intelligent, mature and blazingly quick, he’s something of the prototypical new generation playmaker – the evolution of football personified in a package part German, part Turkish. But more importantly, despite Jogi Loew’s inability to keep anyone somewhere in the vicinity of healthy, Mesut earned his spot on merit, not on injury. One of the best players in the Bundesliga this year – admittedly better in the first half – his rise culminated with Werder’s loss of Diego. With the heart of the German midfield in Ballack now gone too, there’s little to think he won’t be able to make the leap on the international level as he did domestically. That’s just me though. There are plenty of phenomenal talents on that list who could walk away with the trophy at tournament’s end. Who do you reckon will win this year’s FIFA Young Player Award?
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| The World Cup Of Hearing Damage Posted: 08 Jun 2010 03:26 PM PDT
The latest in “ban the vuvuzela” – a campaign destined for inevitable failure – has less to do with the extreme annoyance or disruption in player concentration and more to do with the health of the fans and players. They’re stastitcally bad enough you’re now supposed to use ear plugs for the duration of vuvuzela time. (Occasionally known as World Cup football.) This is the part where I’m supposed to slam FIFA, the vuvuzela and the gnome on the hamster wheel running this World Cup from Zurich, but I can’t even hear myself think through the 250 decibels in my headphones.
The accompanying video: By roughly the second game Saturday, the consensus states there will be two camps in the vuvuzela crowd: those who’ve gotten used to it and would make decent spies – those amenable to torture – or those who’ve hit mute on the television (or on the world, if they’re in the crowd). Or perhaps there’s a third: those who will find the bleeding in their ears from the vuvuzela a pleasant alternative to the commentary team. My suspicions say 60-70% will fall into this third category – rising well into triple digits in the US. Long live the vuvuzela.
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| It’s Spain’s World, We’re Just Livin’ In It. Posted: 08 Jun 2010 02:40 PM PDT At this moment, Spain’s final friendly of their World Cup run up isn’t even over – it’s something like 3-0 in the 57th (it ended a measly 6-0). The score or what have you is an afterthought, as is any debate over the most gifted team in South Africa. The story is the second goal, scored against Poland, which nine months from now will have spawned a David Silva generation of babies to mate with Andres Iniesta’s generation. (Well down the line – this is a family show, after all.) To summarize: Spain is technically on another planet – we’ll call this Planet España, where Xavi is Chief Intelligence Officer, Andres Iniesta the Lord Mayor of the Interior, David Villa the Secretary of Scoring and David Silva the jack of all three. That doesn’t necessarily make them the best team, but shame on you if you miss a second of Spain this World Cup – the Minister of Defense, Carles Puyol, might just show up at your crib and beat you down with his club. Also worth the price of admission.
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| Predicting the World Cup Using Counterfeit Soccer Shirt Sales Posted: 08 Jun 2010 01:40 PM PDT
Or… you can decide the World Cup favourites based on how many fake national team jerseys have been sold in China. Let’s go with the latter method, just for the purposes of this post. According to a story published on the China Daily website today, over 100,000 fake World Cup national team jerseys have been sold on online auction sites. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of fake jerseys, it’s basically something that looks vaguely like the real thing, but is 100% unofficial, very possibly copyright infringing and almost certainly made of comically cheap material. These are not the real thing. But they’re very popular with people who either don’t know the difference, don’t care, or don’t want to spend the money on a official replica shirt. For example, China Daily claims that the majority of replica shirts being sold online in China cost around 50 Chinese yuan (about $7.32 USD or £5 GBP). Based on online sales of counterfeit shirts, the 10 most popular teams in China are as follows: 1. Spain There’s a certain logic to this. The better teams have the better players, and therefore their shirts sell better. So the better teams should theoretically have the best sales. Alternatively, it’s been suggested that the red and yellow Spain jersey is the one that most closely resembles the red and yellow Chinese flag. But if Spain goes and wins this World Cup then we’ll have watertight proof that pirate football shirt sales are a more reliable predictor or World Cup winners that the quantitative analysis of a major financial firm. Which would explain a lot about why the global economy has spent so long in the toilet lately. Of course, it should go without saying that all the World Cup jerseys in our store are 100% official and have spent absolutely no time in anyone’s toilet.
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| Khalid Boulahrouz Gets Punk’d, Ryan Babel Dances. Posted: 08 Jun 2010 12:10 PM PDT Ryan Babel and Eljero Elia do what all proper footballers do on their time off: play video games. Only unlike most, they streamed it live on UStream for everyone to see. Well, like most they put themselves on the internet, only they had clothes on. They didn’t inform Khalid Boulahrouz of their plans, so he entered the room thinking all was between friends. Khalid got slightly embarrassed, and then Ryan did a strange dance. Welcome to the YouTube generation, when you can’t even walk into a room without checking for spy cameras. Or Ryan Babel making weird dance-like gestures.
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| Trying To Find The Common Denominator; Or: The Curse of the Premier League Trophy. Posted: 08 Jun 2010 10:40 AM PDT
Each day for the last two weeks or so I’ve woken up, done something mildly productive, sauntered to the general vicinity of a laptop and gone to the guardian’s World Cup page with one question: “which star went down today?”. Each day I go with the same hope of Chuckie Sullivan at Will Hunting’s door – the hope of nothing – but hope, as you may know, is the most devious of foul-letter words, and someone typically winds up hurt. As with curses, we want to know why so as to avoid doing the same.
Another name comes in the form of John Mikel Obi, which has come as a severe blow to those who were looking forward to rearranging his name for a week or so. Injuries happen, particularly when so much heavy training is instituted amidst games in the weeks before a World Cup. However, this year has gone above and beyond, particularly with the stars, the names in lights. If we’d heard that Heiko Westermann, Rene Adler, Jozy Altidore and whomever else had wound up injured, it’d be business as usual. And thus there are the stars. Going back to the trigger, the obvious link is Chelsea, but that’s not it – at least not entirely. There’s also the factor of Manchester United with Rio, David and Nani present, so it evolves into something of a Manchester United and Chelsea curse. This might lead one to believe Michel Platini is bounding around World Cup training pitches piping players in the knee in a “Just Say No To Child Trafficking” t-shirt. We cannot rule this out. But the curse most rooted in practicality, outside of Andrea Pirlo (clearly there just to throw us off the scent), comes in that every single one of those players has lifted the Premier League trophy, either with ManU or Chelsea. Rio, David, Ballack, Mikel, Drogba, Robben, Eddien, Nani. All Premier League winners, all have hoisted the trophy, all some of the biggest names in the world. Today it’s merely theory, but wait until tomorrow, or the next day, when the latest name off the injury assembly line is stuck at home watching the games with the Premier League winner’s medal in the cabinet next to the television. Or just wait until Wayne Rooney’s inevitable broken metatarsal.
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| Soundoff: Which Injured Star Will You Miss Most at World Cup 2010? Posted: 08 Jun 2010 08:25 AM PDT
Question is: Who will you miss the most? As an England fan I’ll definitely miss Ferdinand. He was the captain after all. But I think if I was given the choice and could magically heal any injured World Cup player, I’d take my magic potion elsewhere. Obviously I’d want to heal Diarra first, but I think an actual serious problem like sickle-cell anemia is best left to proper medical professionals, rather than an over-caffeinated blogger with a hyopthetical potion. I’d still like to see Arjen Robben in full flight down the Dutch flanks, because I genuinely believe he’s up there with Messi and Ronaldo when on form. But since this is the first World Cup on the African continent, I suppose it has to come down to Essien or Drogba, and I think by a narrow margin I’ll miss Essien that little bit more, just because his superhuman all action displays make any game he’s in worth watching. How about you? Which player will you miss most? Who would you like to heal so they could play at World Cup 2010?
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What did Cote d’Ivoire do to FIFA to deserve two terrible World Cup draws in a row? Back in 2006 they got Argentina, Netherlands, Serbia & Montenegro. Not kind. This time around they’re in 
Or: who will earn a big money move to Bayern Munich and see his career nosedive as a result?
There are many different ways of predicting who will win the World Cup. You can trust your judgement, go round by round and predict who wins each game until you arrive at a champion, which is how our 
I’ve almost (but only almost) lost track of all the big name players that have picked up pre-World Cup injuries. There was David Beckham’s tendon tear back in March, there’s Michael Essien’s messed up knee, Michael Ballack’s ankle, Rio Ferdinand’s knee ligaments, Lassana Diarra with complications from sickle-cell anemia, and many more. Portugal’s | You are subscribed to email updates from World Cup Soccer - South Africa 2010 To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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