Euro 2016

[Ming]

What do people here think about the French players reaction to the loss. I thought they acted like little children by not gracefully accepting their silver medals. Players refusing to accept the... and some of those that did, taking them off and dropping them on the ground.
I can understand them being upset about losing a match they were favored in... but come on. Pretty classless if you ask me.

[C0ckney]

yeah, it's totally pathetic. of course they're upset but that's no excuse for not acting like sportsmen. it sets a poor example. they're just a bunch of millionaire crybabies.

[Giancarlo]

Portugal had a resolute defensive display, but they didn't really attack. They did score at their best chance. It was a dull game from them, despite the defensive work. They played catenaccio.

France only have themselves to blame. They had chances. Gignac will be regretting that miss in the 95th minute for years to come. They nearly won it before going into extratime.

Yup.

[BeBMan]

What do people here think about the French players reaction to the loss. I thought they acted like little children by not gracefully accepting their silver medals. Players refusing to accept the... and some of those that did, taking them off and dropping them on the ground.
I can understand them being upset about losing a match they were favored in... but come on. Pretty classless if you ask me.

I didn't watch that far, but yeah sounds pretty absurd, even when they were understandably quite disappointed. Maybe they were mostly angry at themselves, since they were the big favourite at the start and could have won....

[BeBMan]

Overall this Euro was a bit too much dictated by tactical play for my taste.

But no terror and here's a small moment of hope for humanity: ()

https://youtu.be/ENiuRDpztls

[Giancarlo]

Catenaccio... For sure. Portugal rode their luck at times. Scoring against one team in the 117th minute and having penalties another time.

[Ben Kenobi]

What I find somewhat intriguing with Ben Kenobi's story about his childhood exploits is that it seems to me to be an example of how extremely insulated football in North America, Soccer, was until quite recently. Just the idea of having players, even kids, playing a pyramid formation more than 80 years or so after the revision of the offside rule and Chapman's introduction of the WM-formation is almost mind-boggling. It looks like, while football in the rest of the world became more and more global, soccer in at least some parts of the US and Canada [added after Jrabbit comment] lived a life in almost complete isolation. This is not the first time I have heard or read about weird things like that.

Hi Kropotkin. Couple of points.

We didn't start out 2-3-5. The team switched to it after running a 3-3-4, and losing. We lost the first year with the 2-3-5 due to injuries on our right defense, and then won it all the next year.

The strength of the team was in our midfield. We had the two best midfielders in the entire league. And probably the best striker.

We had two converted wingers playing defense. Rather than going with taller, and slower players, both of us were very small for our age but fast. Defense was never my natural position, but somehow the coach ended up putting me there. In hindsight, his strategy made perfect sense, but it wasn't the obvious formation for our team. Once we started winning, we just kept doing the same things.

We also had a converted keeper who had never played Keeper before.

The strength of the team is that they'd all played together for a long time, and that they knew each other's tendencies. 5 years at the point in which I joined them, I was one of the later additions to the squad. I don't think what system we ran would really have mattered, so long as we had three midfielders. However, the 2-3-5 took advantage of several things.

We had five people attacking. Most defenses hadn't seen it before and didn't know what to do about it. Given time, I'm sure the league would have adapted, but when you've got a strategy that most coaches have never seen before... We'd get up 1-0, 2-0 and generally just keep attacking. By that time it's difficult to climb out of the hole.

We also took advantages of Offsides. Having two defenders at the half, meant that so long as we were level with each other, opposing strikers were immediately offsides. We would move up right to the half, and put strikers challenging for cleared balls.

We'd then get the ball back and could go on the attack. The best example was when we played the all stars and they played a 4-5-1. We put the striker offsides, easily, 5,6 times.

[kentonio]

For any serious football fan, reading that post was like having a sandpaper enema..

[Ben Kenobi]

It's a good thing you're not a serious soccer fan.

[kentonio]

That's funny, I've been a serious football fan for over 30 years you noob.

[Giancarlo]

It's a good thing you're not a serious soccer fan.

It would be good if you actually knew anything about the sport. BTW, I am a serious fan of Atletico Madrid and to a lesser extent AC Milan. I also play football with friends and used to play in college. I was either put in midfield or as a forward.

Stick to the man in the clouds. Your entire post shows how much of a noob you really are.