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Category Archives: Argentina v Germany
Argentina 0-4 Germany: Part III – I Wanted to Play Football for the Coach
After 30 seconds he received the ball in a comfortable position, tried to pass it to a teammate and promptly fell on his arse. After two minutes he gave away a silly foul out by the touchline. From the ensuing free kick he lost his man and Argentina were a goal behind. In the next ten minutes, he gave the ball away several times and by the tenth minute he had been booked. Only Germany deciding to relinquish their grip on Argentina’s neck meant that he was able to hide until half time.
Just as in the Nigeria match, however, Maradona was too slow with his substitutions. More or less the first time the ball came his way more than twenty minutes into the second half, Otamendi and Demichelis contrived to turn a relatively unthreatening situation into the killer goal for Germany. [Muller lying prone on the grass was still more than a match for both of them]. Maradona bottled it spectacularly, taking off Otamendi and replacing him with… nobody.
Pegamequemegusta spilled maté all over the table at this point and yelled furiously at scandalised family and friends. He’s just turned a 2-0 or, at best, a 2-1 into a three or four goal rout! Yet again an Argentina manager bottles it in the second half of a WC quarter final. Incredible. In that respect, never having been in that position before, Maradoan was found out. He finished the match with four or five strikers on the pitch but now without any pretence of a system whatsoever, like Louis Van Gaal with Holland in the Greatest Match of All time in 2001. Continue reading
Argentina 0-4 Germany – Part II: Full of High Sentence but a Bit Obtuse
With Tevez, Di María and Higuaín all performing so badly and with such a lack of discipline, Maradona’s plan imploded spectacularly on Saturday. Despite, as Jonathan Wilson says in his Sports Illustrated article, Argentina looking the more ‘threatening team’ after the opening 20 minutes or so, they didn’t create one decent chance. On Off the Ball tonight, he expanded on why Argentina’s approach should work, saying, in characteristic fashion, that “triangles always beat lines”. The only two times we remember the forwards actually making those angles they created two half-chances: the first when Messi put Tevez through; the second when Higuaín was caught offside. This was supposed to be Argentina’s great strength but they individuals failed spectacularly. They were impatient from the off. Frustrated with their own ineptitude, it wasn’t long before they began shooting lamely over the bar from 25 yards. A strikeforce that had promised to slice the German defence in a manner reminscent of a mathematician’s wet dream, ended up looking but full of high sentence and more than little obtuse. Continue reading
Argentina 0-4 Germany – Part I: Mad as Hell
The French are arguably the worst offenders when it comes to this kind of waffly pseudoscientific rhetoric that mistakes its own impotence for some kind of higher ground. Their universities, tv shows, newspapers and the whole edifice of their wankery, chattering classes stink of it. The clown Domenech and his supporters in the French FA are a fine example of this, as was De Villepin’s speech to the UN before the invasion of Iraq. Pegamequemegusta is not interested in bashing the French people, but we do consider this perfidious, self-defeating drive for respectability under the guises of scientifically neutral ‘progress’ to be of French origin.
When you’re talking about novels, poems, Beatles songs or football matches, though, often there just isn’t any data to extract, or at least nothing worth extracting. For the Frenchman and the bureaucratic-minded geek, however, there must be no restrictions on their systematising crusade. An accurate portrayal of events would lead to inconsequential conclusions and would deny them the opportunity to use their analytical tools. They prefer the method, however flawed, to the subject of investigation. They’re a bunch of jerks. Continue reading
