EURO 2012 Semi Finals

debaser wrote:

worms. wrote:

messiah wrote:also ronaldo is pique's bitch. a few times during the game he would start a run and see pique in that general position and change his run. fear is good
pedro should start ever game he gives the team that cutting edge they are missing without villa.
also hope no one is giving ronaldo a hard time with the pk.the best takers always take the 1st,3rd and 5th. its not his fault bruno missed

wouldn't have made a difference if ronaldo took the 1st penalty. Alves and Moutinho would still have missed and Spain would have still gone through.

I don't agree with that thinking. Penalties are a big part psychological. If Portugal put Ronaldo first and he scores, they would've been 1-0 up after 1 round, which changes the dynamics for the next takers (in particular, a lot more pressure on next Spain taker as they are playing catchup and another miss could well be fatal, whereas less pressure on Portugal players). When you need to score just to level up the scoreline, pressure is that much more intense and affects some takers, as I think it did Alves.

For example, I'd speculate in the England shootout that if Young had scored, Cole might well have done so too. Cole hit a crap penalty, but the momentum shift put a lot more pressure on him at that point - he needed to score to level it up and knew that a miss would give Italy the opportunity to win with the next kick.

Conversely in the Bayern-Chelsea shootout, Cole's penalty came right after Olic missed. Chelsea missed their first one but scored the next two and the Olic miss would've felt like a reprieve - suddenly momentum in their favour and Cole scores. Flip it round - say Olic missed Bayern's first penalty, but Mata missed the penalty before Cole & though the score would be the same, it would've felt a totally different situation (Chelsea would've been the one who just thrown away a leading position rather than Bayern) - in fact, much more like the England situation vs Italy.

Of course this is all unprovable as you can never rerun the whole situation again to test it..Best you could do is try and do some stats on past shootouts, calculate the probability of various scenarios, e.g. a player missing after a team-mate missed vs after a team-mate scored, and so forth.

110% wrote:

Disco Benny wrote:

Sergio Vamos wrote:Nope not having that,you are just jealous because your 2 teams have won nothing of significance in your life time.

Young man, you are making the classic mistake of believing that the sole validation for supporting a team is how good they are at winning things.

That might be the overriding criteria that the likes of you and Jim-Jong-Kong the Man City supporter from China allow to dictate your allegiances, however for the rest of us it's for far more personal and pure reasons.

Spain is about as much "your" team as Manchester United is to a sheep shearing farmer in New Zealand. There is nothing to be jealous about here. The Spanish can be very proud of their team. The fact they have attracted vacuous bandwagon jumpers like moths to a flame isn't their fault

I think you are being a bit harsh on Mr Kong from China here. There is not that much difference in how people in London choose teams like man united or liverpool to support and how people in China do it. It is about players they like, how the team plays and of course success is part of that (they are not going to choose to support Wigan fighting relegation every season over manu, man city, chelsea etc). They tend to have only one club and they stick with it, which is something worms missed in his banging on about culture and history BS. Basically one of the aspects of supporting a club is that other clubs are your rivals so it does not work to support 3 clubs in the same league. BTW There is also a lot of England supporters there, and England didn't win anything since 1966 so how exactly are they glory-hunters in this regard? Shouldn't they all be supporting, maybe spain, like worms?

Probably there are some gloryhunting c**ts in asia, but please don't insult them by comparing them all to worms.

worms. wrote:Pirlo hit the most awesome penalty ever after Montolivo missed so i dont agree

worms. wrote:but i like both of them o why cant i support both of them? theres no rule against it!

worms. wrote:the only other time ive seen it done is tottti in euro 2000. his one was sweet!

worms. wrote:Not sure Zidane's one actually crossed the line but yeh i forgot about that one. has anyone ever done it and the keeper just stood there and caught it?

worms. wrote:did anyone see that peice of skill that busquets did at the corner flag? and 110% still wants to call him average

S4P wrote:He'd have done a good job to see that particular video, given that it was only uploaded on Tuesday (as were 3 other videos of it).

Sergio Vamos wrote:

worms. wrote:did anyone see that peice of skill that busquets did at the corner flag? and 110% still wants to call him average

Yep I seen that, totally skinned Pepe!

Show me a gif of Neville doing that.

abundance wrote:

worms. wrote:the only other time ive seen it done is tottti in euro 2000. his one was sweet!

Apart from the original from Panenka, Zidane did it perfectly going just under the crossbar in regular time at WC 06 final (which is even more crazy cause if that kind of attempt goes wrong you're close to 0 chance of being offered a tap-in)

worms. wrote:

S4P wrote:He'd have done a good job to see that particular video, given that it was only uploaded on Tuesday (as were 3 other videos of it).

the video did exist before tuesday though! i'ts not like the video suddenly came to life on tuesday!

abundance wrote:

worms. wrote:the only other time ive seen it done is tottti in euro 2000. his one was sweet!

Apart from the original from Panenka, Zidane did it perfectly going just under the crossbar in regular time at WC 06 final (which is even more crazy cause if that kind of attempt goes wrong you're close to 0 chance of being offered a tap-in)

worms. wrote:

S4P wrote:He'd have done a good job to see that particular video, given that it was only uploaded on Tuesday (as were 3 other videos of it).

the video did exist before tuesday though! i'ts not like the video suddenly came to life on tuesday!

S4P wrote:

worms. wrote:

S4P wrote:He'd have done a good job to see that particular video, given that it was only uploaded on Tuesday (as were 3 other videos of it).

the video did exist before tuesday though! i'ts not like the video suddenly came to life on tuesday!

The only video I have found of it on youtube that was uploaded before Sunday's game was "Barcelona-Milan friendly penalty shootout". It's understable that Hart didn't see that video, especially if he was just briefly searching for "Pirlo penalties".

However, in the last 2-3 days a number of videos have been uploaded with titles like "Pinto saves Pirlo chipped penalty" etc.

S4P wrote:But as Bernd says, it's strange that someone who claims to see every Barcelona game wouldn't have seen such a memorable, emotional match as Ronaldinho's return to the Camp Nou. It was no ordinary friendly.

Sergio Vamos wrote:

S4P wrote:But as Bernd says, it's strange that someone who claims to see every Barcelona game wouldn't have seen such a memorable, emotional match as Ronaldinho's return to the Camp Nou. It was no ordinary friendly.

I did see it actually.

S4P wrote:

worms. wrote:well i guess he didnt do his research very well then. Typical english - no brain!

Well if the biggest Barcelona fan on the planet had not seen the incident, I think we can forgive an arrogant young English goalkeeper.

You do also realise that by saying "typical English" you are in fact insulting yourself? As you say... no brain.