quinch on 21/6/2010 at 12:41
Congratulations to New Zealand. Two points from two games and two goals in an extremely difficult group.
Maybe New Zealand can become a powerful new emerging football nation. Is it really more popular is schools than rugby?
Gryzemuis on 21/6/2010 at 12:49
Quote Posted by quinch
Maybe New Zealand can become a powerful new emerging football nation
I was told that New Zealand has 25 full-time professional football players. And half of them play abroad. Dream on.
Gryzemuis on 21/6/2010 at 12:59
Quote Posted by Brian The Dog
Personally I think it's more to do with the lower-ranked teams being better organised whereas the "better" teams are all just thrown together and expected to work without much training together. Although tiredness does have a part, sure.
On the Dutch TV there's been a lot of discussion why the bigger teams do not impress. The conclusion seems to be that "2nd rank" nations, like African teams, Korea, Japan, Australia, etc are all top-fit. They only start to get tired and make more mistakes half-way the 2nd half. And by that time, the players in the big nations are tired too. And their players are physically big, fast and strong. Many of those 2nd rank teams are managed by European coaches nowadays. And even if they can't completely change a team, they are able to teach those teams how to play a very solid defense. Those teams do not try to "make the game" or even win. They just defend, try not to make mistakes, and wait for that one lucky break. And supposedly their newly learned defense strategies, combined with their fitness, strength and speed, is good enough to stop many of the old top countries.
I think they have a point.
Quote:
On the plus side for England, we're not as chaotic as the French! Normally it's the Dutch who implode, but this one takes the biscuit.
Nobody has an idea how well the Netherlands will do. Two years ago we played well, beating France and Italy in the poule-games. And then we got beaten by Russia in a crappy game when we didn't pay attention. Now we started with 2 bad games. But with 6 points. So suddenly all the media starts yapping "we now play like Germany, bad start, but good ending".
The thing that could make a big difference for us is our wing players. Modern teams don't play with wing strikers anymore. Because there aren't many left. But we have Robben, who played a marvelous season at Bayern as right wing striker. And we've seen a few good moments from young player Elia on the left wing. So suddenly all the the Netherlands think: "when the going gets tough, we'll put Robben and Elia on the field, and our attack will improve tremendously".
It seems we'll play Italy in the first elimination round. And Brazil in the next game (quarterfinals). So it seems the going will get tough for us very quickly. Even if NL plays better, we'll have 4 very tough games ahead of us. I don't see us get in the finals.
Starrfall on 21/6/2010 at 13:47
North Korea team's not going to make it back home
The Alchemist on 21/6/2010 at 14:09
That was epically embarrassing. WTF! Did they just give up?
ercles on 21/6/2010 at 14:11
Quote Posted by quinch
Maybe New Zealand can become a powerful new emerging football nation. Is it really more popular is schools than rugby?
Nope. New Zealand has to be the most single minded supporters of one sport I've ever seen.
Soccer has remarkably high amateur participation in Australia, it's certainly the biggest growth amateur sport in the nation if not the biggest outright. But in both countries the gulf between club soccer and any sort of development systems on shore is monumental. It's fairly telling that Pim Verbeek was highly reluctant to select any players who play professional football in Australia.
dj_ivocha on 21/6/2010 at 15:30
What's with the pitches in this world cup? It's as if the grass doesn't have any roots and is just laid on the turf and every time someone slides on it or even just kicks the ball a bit harder, giant patches of grass and turf get dug up and thrown around. Ugh.
Also when I grow up, I want to become a referee just like Khalil Al Ghamdi! :thumb:
Zygoptera on 22/6/2010 at 00:01
Some of the pitches are (part) artificial, aren't they?
Quote Posted by ercles
Nope.
Technically correct, maybe, but there's pretty much nothing in it and it's statistically a dead heat.
Cricket 237,965
Football 227,266 (includes indoors)
Rugby 189,661
Football 185,292
[figures ex SPARC]
Football would be behind Union, League and, marginally, Cricket on the number of professionals front and well behind on things like viewership and crowds overall, of course, but on the straight participation front it
is bigger than rugby. It's also significant that our one genuinely big league football player (Ryan Nelsen, I played against him 5 times :smug:) gets paid more than most of the All Blacks squad combined.
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New Zealand has to be the most single minded supporters of one sport I've ever seen.
Nah, not really though it may look that way from the outside. The largest crowds for 'provincial' games this year in both Christchurch and Wellington (pretty sure Hamilton too, but not 100%; and
including rugby) were for the one pro football team we have, and we have things like a third of a city's population turning out to welcome the America's Cup- rugby just happens to be the sport we are most consistently good at. Even then, a
lot of people simply don't care or actively dislike rugby because some rugby supporters are, frankly, and speaking as a rugby supporter, douchebags who take things
far too seriously.
Quote Posted by quinch
Maybe New Zealand can become a powerful new emerging football nation.
The problem is that we simply do not have a large enough population or enough money to be consistently competitive and to maximise the talent which is produced, or to have a professional league. You can go a long way with a very well trained, well led, extremely fit and utterly committed team- unbeaten after two rounds, more goals than England, equal with Italy is better than anyone could have expected- but you aren't going to be consistently successful on those factors alone. We'll probably have our one pro team thrown out* of Australia's league soon as they are now in a different confederation and some in Asia were not very pleased with us putting their fifth team out in qualification
*they want to classify all New Zealanders as foreign players even in our team, and there's a review coming up soon on whether they should be there at all.
ercles on 22/6/2010 at 01:08
What numbers are you using? The only stuff I could (
http://www.nzsssc.org.nz/secondary_schools_sports_data) find related to schools placed ruby union ahead of soccer by about 7,000 students.
The fact that Ryan Nelson gets paid so much more isn't a reflection of the popularity of soccer, it's a reflection of the fact that even mediocre football players in English clubs get paid more money than a great rugby player can earn in Australia or New Zealand. Do you think that he's a bigger sports celebrity in New Zealand than Dan Carter or Ritchie Mcaw? Andrew Bogut earns degrees of significance more money than all rugby players in Australia, and still most people wouldn't recognize him if they saw him (apart from maybe the fact that he's fucking huge).
Zygoptera on 22/6/2010 at 06:26
The problem with the Secondary School figures are that most school age football players play for clubs rather than their schools and are thus not counted by the NZSSA- they are actually not affiliated with New Zealand Football at all (the clubs are).
I actually quoted the figures for adults by mistake, the figures for children have football as most popular by some margin:
Soccer 17.4 20.1 13.4
Rugby Union 7.7 11.1 2.6
Figures are from Sport and Recreation New Zealand (SPARC), total%, male%, female%, children playing organised sport
I wouldn't take those figures as gospel as they are not without problems as well (eg being from 2001), but that is a fairly large margin.
Ryan Nelsen was pretty well known here even before the WC, he is captain of a premier league club, after all, and it's also pretty well known that he, Steve Williams (Tiger's caddy) and Scott Dixon are the three highest paid NZ sportsmen.
