The Football Thread

[Gaspar]

This is amazing to watch.

[NobleHelium]

Who needs penalty shoot-outs to blow through everyone's total goal targets. Google is showing 5-0 at the moment but their high level summary is only showing 4-0. Seems even google cannot keep up.

Google's overall score always updates faster before their major events listing. They pull the events from the ESPN highlight list which takes longer to update as you'd expect.

[pindicator]

Let's put some salt on that...

Edit: Apologies Ichabod

[Cyneheard]

I didn't realize this was an NFL game.

[Bacchus]

Well at least they got one in...

[Brian Shanahan]

I dislike the Dutch primarily due to club reasons. I care infinitely more about club football than international football - I'd trade a US world cup win for an Arsenal CL win without hesitation, for example. But the Dutch are pretty tough to like simply because Robben is the most blatant diver in the game, even if you completely ignore the existence of van Judas. Tim Krul's antics were pretty loathsome yesterday as well, where he's getting in the face of these players who just spent 120 minutes for the second game in 4 days absolutely leaving their guts on the floor trying to stay alive in the tournament. He's pulled similarly irritating antics in club football as well, in fact he and the Dutch Skunk got themselves into some fairly memorable handbags before he got his 50 pieces of silver from Ol' Red Nose.

That said, of course they played the better football and deserved to go through, no problem with that.

On Robben and van Persie 90% of "dives" as far as ever I've seen are people simply preserving the integrity of their shin-bones after a horrific studs up, slide from ten yards out tackle, that the ref may not even acknowledge with a free kick, never mind the red card it deserves. It is telling that between the two sports that split over the idea of hacking (the "art" of tackling by kicking a player in the shins), it is rugby which wanted it kept that has eradicated the practise while it flourishes in soccer.

On Tim Krul that was weak refereeing. The ref could have booked him the first time for unsportsmanlike conduct, and told him "next time you're off" and it would have been the end of it.

[BRickAstley]

Is this Ichabod? We should probably make sure he's okay...

[Gaspar]

On Robben and van Persie 90% of "dives" as far as ever I've seen are people simply preserving the integrity of their shin-bones after a horrific studs up, slide from ten yards out tackle, that the ref may not even acknowledge with a free kick, never mind the red card it deserves. It is telling that between the two sports that split over the idea of hacking (the "art" of tackling by kicking a player in the shins), it is rugby which wanted it kept that has eradicated the practise while it flourishes in soccer.

On Tim Krul that was weak refereeing. The ref could have booked him the first time for unsportsmanlike conduct, and told him "next time you're off" and it would have been the end of it.

I agree generally speaking that dives are overspoken about but surely Robben takes it to a whole other level. Ashley Young is the only other one I can really think of who is remotely close.

The Krul stuff might be weak refereeing, and I agree that the officials do an appalling job making sure goalkeepers behave during penalty shootouts, but it doesn't make him any less of a <insert expletive here>.

[Commodore]

That's probably the biggest wave of Holocaust jokes I've ever seen.

Probably already some Germans denying this many goals were scored. "The number of 7 is exaggerated."

[NobleHelium]

Supposedly Spanish-language commentators are using Robben as a synonym for dive.