By Myles Palmer
SUNDAY’s World Cup FINAL will be horrible, vicious,ugly and boring.It won’t be a spectacle.
It will be everything that football shouldn’t be.
It will be virtually unwatchable and it will test Collina, if he is the ref, and keep testing him, probably for two hours and beyond as Kahn makes the penalty save that wins it.
IS THAT YOUR NIGHTMARE?
I think the World Cup is over, really.
We won’t see any more good games. We all just hope that Brazil can win and Blatter will hand the trophy to Cafu on Sunday.
Brazil 1 Turkey 0 should have been Brazil 4 Turkey 1.
Big Phil said :We should have won by more. And he was right.
It was THRILLING when Gilberto collected Rustu’s quick throw and flew down the left wing past Fatih Akyel to set up Ronaldo for the goal.
That change of gear is what makes all Brazilian teams so hard to contain. It can come from anywhere, at any time, and it stretches teams to breaking point before they can blink.
This counter-attack happened in a flash and it came from Gilberto, who had never gone down the left wing ONCE in the five previous matches!
The goal, oddly enough, was a ROMARIO goal, the kind the little man scored in USA 94, sharpshooter’s goal, an instinctive stab-shot that bounced and squeezed over the line.
Ronaldo proved me right by only lasting 68 minutes. But he proved me wrong by scoring from a through ball. Not from a cross.
It was PREDICTABLE when Sukur started and made all the right runs and couldn’t get a shot in.
It was HILARIOUS when sub Denilson made a crossfield
dribble at the death and four Turks frantically chased him to the far touchline
CAFU has been phenomenal in this tournament. He was superb again today. His second half interception on SAS in the box was just different class – I thought it was Roque Junior at first.
RIVALDO played selfishly – but Brazil might have lost without him.
Big Phil doesn’t have much on the bench. That was proved today. He has 11 or 12, but not 18 or even 15.
Luizao was clumsy, Denilson fiddled, Edilson was only competent.
So the return of RONALDINHO will be crucial.He is fresh and much fitter than the Big R’s. If he chips Kahn from 40 yards he might get belated recognition(see below).
TURKEY didn’t play as well as they can do and carried no threat in the last third. Round the box they lacked conviction,rarely producing a good final ball and almost never a dangerous shot.
But Sukur’s hook-volley was a fine effort and ILHAN livened things up a lot.
WITHOUT BALLACK, the Germans will play for penalties.
Rob Hughes has been sending me his International Herald Tribune reports and his pieces for Singapore, Indian, Korean and Japanese papers and I was pleased to see, this morning, that Rob had noted Ballack’s two-footedness.
(Good journalism is anything I agree with, or anything I don’t know.)
Watching Ballack’s stealthy, decisive surge I thought : he ghosts into the box like Martin Peters and finishes with two sweet feet, like Socrates, the tall Brazilian from 1982.
A fit Ballack would have buried the chance first time.
But the way he knocked in the rebound with his left was fabulous, as if he had rehearsed it 200 times.He made something difficult look easy.
Rob wrote this : “Neuville’s pass had dissected the two remaining defenders, leaving Ballack with goalkeeper Lee to beat. His first attempt, with the right foot, was saved by the legs of Lee, but with two-footed prowess that is the hallmark of Michael Ballack, he smartly volleyed the ball into the goal.”
EXACTLY! But BALLACK didn’t do it against Arsenal did he?
SUNDAY’S FINAL will be a rubbish game and a major anti-climax after today’s classic which had everything I expected : a tense,tight, technical, compelling game between two well-matched sides.
35 minmutes in, you could see Brazil thinking : We’ve really got a game on our hands here, let’s move up a gear and try to score before halftime.So they did -and it almost worked.
After a 15 minute rest, RONALDO was able to score the goal that mattered.
RONALDO cruised onto Gilberto’s pass,ALPAY backed off fatally and invited him to shoot, which he did with a right foot prod.
RUSTU, unprepared, got a hand to to it and should have turned it round the post. But it went in for the only goal of the game in 49 minutes. thats football.
My friend Lalo turned up in time for a chat about Argentina before kick-off.
He said that only one soccer reporter in Buenos Aires had predicted they would not get out of the group. This guy, a big fan of superkid Riquelme, said Bielsa put his system before the players.
That is almost what I’ve been saying here : Inflexible,system-worship, over-technical, over-rehearsed, too rigid, too static, a case of blocked energy, artistry shackled, inhibited, never released, wasted.
That Argentina team was like a great album that’s been re-mixed so many times that all the energy is lost in the mix. The music becomes dead.
Lalo said that three Argentines in a football team is fine. Eleven is usually too many. In that they resemble Holland, methinks.
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BRAZIL(3-5-2): 1-Marcos; 3-Lucio, 5-Edmilson, 4-Roque Junior; 2-Cafu, 8-Gilberto Silva,15-Kleberson(Belletti 85), 6-Roberto Carlos 10-Rivaldo; 9-Ronaldo(Luizao 68), 20-Edilson(Denilson 75).
TURKEY(4-5-1): 1-Rustu Recber; 4-Fatih Akyel, 3-Bulent Korkmaz, 5-Alpay Ozalan; 22-Umit Davala(Izzet 74),8-Tugay Kerimoglu, 10-Yildiray Basturk(Arif Erdem 88),18-Ergun Penbe, 11-Hasan Sas, Emre Belozoglu(Ilhan Mansiz 62; 9-Hakan Sukur.
REFEREE: Kim Milton Neilsen (Denmark)
LINESMEN: Maciej Wierzbowski (Poland), Igor Sramka (Slovakia)
BOOKED: Gilberto Silva,Tugay, Hasan Sas.
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P.S. QUOTE FROM RONALDO I JUST SAW ON THE WIRES :”It was a Romario-style goal.”
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P.P.S.
THIS FROM ALAN SEIFERT :
Myles,
In the BBC’s Top Ten Goals of the World Cup list they have excluded Ronaldinho’s against England, so it’s not just Seaman who’s in denial. Like you, I believe he meant it and Seaman cocked it up.
If Beckham had scored it it would have been ‘THE GREATEST GOAL EVER BY AN ENGLISHMAN’ and ‘NO GOALKEEPER IN THE WORLD COULD HAVE SAVED IT’.How miserable is that?
In the meantime,we’ve got to sign Rustu, but I bet we start the new season with Seaman in goal.(BORING!!)