Fighting Talker

Thank you Who Ate All the Pies for putting this together. My favorite is below:

The days of plausibly live matches, commerical interruptions and tape delay seem gone, as NBC has teamed up with two major cable companies to create four special all-Olympics channels including an all-soccer one.

One channel will be devoted exclusively to carrying men’s and women’s soccer games 12 hours a day, while a second channel will carry men’s and women’s basketball games 14 hours a day. A third channel will be broadcast in Mandarin and the fourth in Korean.

It sounds like they will be used primarly to complement the coverage already provided live by the standard NBC networks. This likely means that every single match of both the men’s and women’s Olympic soccer tournaments will be covered live and available in more US-time zone-friendly timeslots.

And good news to my primarily DC-based readers, Cox Cable (Fairfax County and Fredericksburg, Va.) and Comcast (almost everywhere else) have already agreed to carry the channels.

So, with Euro 2008 at an end, I will leave the in-depth tactical analysis of why Spain won over Germany to others better equipped to do so such as career winners losers Steve McClaren, Graham Taylor, and especially this guy,^ who propelled himself to a career of punditry on a bed of boring cliches that are only slightly better informed than Marcelo Balboa’s. So instead, I want to comment on ESPN’s coverage of Euro 2008 and what this bodes for the future. (more…)

Absolutely right. Way to go Spain, you absolutely deserved it and beat the Germans. You can’t have a much more satisfying win than that. And well done to ESPN for their very clever post-game headline here:

Am I the only one kind of excited that El Salvador is one fairly reasonable step away from having to play the US here in the USA and quite possibly in Washington D.C.? (more…)

Let’s just catchup with some of the stories flying around the blogosphere

Euro 2008 Quarterfinals start today - On paper, the matchups, starting with today’s Germany-Portugal match, look outstanding, but one just hopes that teams don’t revert to the defensive tactics we’ve actually seen little of during the group phase. Based on what I’ve seen throughout this tournament (and ignoring past big match pedigree and the prospect of pks) it’s really hard to see Portugal not advancing today. That said, as soon as you take into account all those things I mentioned in the parentheses, suddenly it’s hard to see the Germans losing. I am going to stand by my pre-tourney pick of the Portuguese. 2-1 Portugal. (more…)

MLS Rumors channels Fox News today when it says:

After LA Galaxy forward, Edson Buddle’s second hat-trick this past weekend many have been calling for him to be called up to the National Team.

Who would that be exactly? Where is this underground clamoring for Edson Buddle? I hear a lot of cooky names thrown out for the USA, but I have heard his name tossed out there exactly ZERO times during the last few years.

This is just like when some airhead says on Fox, “some people say that Hillary Clinton puts babies on spikes.”

Let’s all just rise from all our seats, put our hands together, and give the Czech Republic the ovation it is properly due for the Best Choke of the 2008 UEFA European Championships. Up 2-0 with less that 20 minutes to go, it takes a certain vast degree of mental frailty to allow three goals to Turkey.

The Czechs, with one of the best goalkeepers in the world and four Serie A defenders, have no one to blame but themselves. The Turks’ final goal was onside, barely and even so, there is no excuse for that kind of capitulation, which has to rank amongst the worst chokes in recent international soccer history. I personally cannot think of any worse single-game collapses. Yugoslavia-Spain in Euro 2000 comes close but Yugoslavia had already qualified from the group when they blew a stoppage-time lead so it was Norway, and not the choke artists themselves, that paid the price.

Can any of you out there think of any better single-game chokes in a major international tournament?

Let’s the get the least interesting and meaningful qualifying match out of the way here first…

• The U.S. obliterated Barbados, 8-0, in the first leg of the Nats’ opening round of World Cup Qualifying. If the scoreline wasn’t bad enough, even Eddie Johnson scored. There is no point analysing this other than to say that no one apparantly got hurt. This first round that CONCACAF added for 2006 is such a waste of time, and I suspect nothing more than a sop to Jack Warner’s prime constituency of tiny islands who now have more of an opportunity of a big-money opponent coming to whatever dust bowl, cricket ground, velodrome, mud bog, etc. they play home matches on. (more…)

Let’s start with the prediction: DC will win tonight against New York. Missing Gallardo and Namoff will be tough, and I am curious to see how Soehn elects to arrange things in their absence. I’d like to see Fred in the No. 10 role, which is where he spent most of his time in Melbourne. Also, I am curious to see how the ovation for Quaranta after the very good article on his addiction struggles in today’s Post.

Euro 2008 Thoughts: (more…)