World Cup build up - Jogi Löw's dress sense, where the hell is Kaka? & part 2 of sh*t that happened before we were born

Week two of my work cup build up. Remember as I said last week, this is being written from the perspective of a 32-34 year old man; so if you're a little older or younger you might have differing opinions (or memories) of some of the things I'll talk about in my World Cup history/catch up. That being said it might be a week or so until we actually get to a tournament that any readers have seen. Unless I've completely misread the age of my audience; and if I have great, I'm all for older people using the internet. My parents have started to use it quite a lot in the last 6 months, although it does mean that I am now on 24 hour IT support (the queries I tend to get centre around saving documents and rotating pictures). All this being said my dad doesn't really go on much about the World Cup in the 50's and 60's, all I ever get told about is Scotland flopping in 78 and Eder's goal against the USSR in 82 (we'll get to those later though, I don't want to spoil any future posts).

Before we go into all that historical shiz (apparently I've stolen the word "Shiz" off of the Mrs, yeah right! I make up my own shiz, I don't need hers!) let's look at what's been happening this week. Everyone is submitting their squads, well not everyone, and in some cases it's the 30 man preliminary short-list, but there have been developments regarding who will be playing in this year's World Cup.

Imagine if Roy Hodgson was this well dressed

The even impeccably dressed, Joachim Löw, has named his 30 man German squad, which is to be trimmed to 23 next week. The biggest news there is that there's only 2 strikers in the 30 and no room for Mario Gomez. I suppose Gomez's omission isn't as big a shock considering he's been injured all season, but two strikers? This is partly down to his refusal to pick the Leverkusen striker Stefan Kießling for calling him a "Sissi", which I obviously find hilarious (I'm sorry but the only links I could find to the story were in German, you have to take my word for it this is 100% true). Can I just say Stefan, just because a man takes pride in his appearance and has a diverse wardrobe, it DOES NOT make him a "Sissi". No World Cup for you!!

The Brazil 23 has been named, no messing about, just like Bosnia. And on paper it doesn't look amazing. I suppose you can't argue with it too much though, they did win last year's confederations cup beating Spain in the final. A lot has been made of the fact it contains 6 players from the Premier League, but then many of them (not all) make sense to me as does the omission of Robinho aka "The next Pele". He has been dog poo this year, I tried to find one of his open goal misses from this season but only succeeded in finding a compilation of misses from his entire career, including one that defies physics for Santos (David Blaine would have been proud of this trick), forgive the crazy Arabic commentary.

You stole Kaka's place!!

And then there's Kaka. Maybe it's the old romantic in me, but I thought that Kaka was having a decent season this year and had hoped he'd make it into Scolari's squad (which would have been his 4th tournament). Alas "Big Phi" doesn't feel so and has chosen to go with the likes of Oscar, and Will.i.an. Personally I think Will.i.an should stick to The Voice (I DO NOT watch The Voice by the way, the Mrs does). Additionally I was amused to see that Scolari had chosen his two OAP sounding strikers Bernard & Fred. I assure anybody reading this who is not familiar with the Brazilian national team, I am not making those names up. Expect a lot of jokes from the BBC and ITV commentary teams this summer. Come to think of it Adrian Chiles is gonna have a field day, maybe their selection wasn't such a good thing after all...

By the end of this week we should know all of the official World Cup 23 man squads, another sign that the tournament is around the corner (tomorrow will be a month until the opening game). I wonder whether there will be any shock inclusions? Do England have any promising uncapped teenage sensations? I suppose we could say Ross Barkley and Luke Shaw. Never fear though, I'm sure James Milner will make the squad, if we're lucky we might even get Stuart Downing too!

We move on to part two of my World Cup catch up, the story so far. We're still in the region of sh*t that happened before we were born. Last time round Brazil were doing their best to mess up every time it looked like they were going to win the thing and Italy and Uruguay were taking full advantage of this.

1954
The 1954 World Cup sounds like footballing heaven. It didn't have a superstar like Maradona, Pele, Baggio or Ronaldo (although it could be argued that it had Puskas), but it had goals. Tons of em. More goals than you could shake a stick at  as they say (I'm not sure why you'd shake a stick at anything that occurred in abundance, especially goals). Hungary, with the aforementioned Puskas, were the favourites to win having been unbeaten for a few years, but in true World Cup fashion they didn't. They lost a dramatic final 3-2 to a West German side sporting revolutionary boots with screw-in studs made by ex-Nazi party member Adi Dassler.

The final is always called The Miracle of Berne, which is apt as the 1954 World Cup was in Switzerland (and even Uruguay showed up),  and as the Germans came back from going 2-0 down within the first 8 minutes of the game to win 3-2 (see, I told you there were goals galore, start shaking your sticks!). On top of that the two teams had met earlier in the group stage and Hungary won 8-3 (shake your sticks), although the Germans had tactically fielded a weaker team, so nobody had given West Germany a hope of winning the tournament.

There are a number of conspiracy theorists that say Hungary were cheated out of winning the trophy, because FIFA didn't want a communist nation winning, they had a perfectly legitimate equaliser ruled out for offside minutes from the end of the game. Oh well, Hungary were a great side anyway, they'd already reached the 1934 final too, they'd get another chance right? It's not like they'd have a bloody political uprising two years later causing most of their best players to flee the country for their own safety and never be the same again...

1958
Fifa went back to snubbing South America in 1958 so the tournament remained in Europe, Sweden being the hosts. Brazil finally won the tournament beating the Swedes 5-2 in the final, don't shake a stick at that, although that is a lot of goals, this tournament wasn't the goalfest that 1954 was (it had the first ever 0-0 draw in the World Cup). That being said there were still a lot of goals, I'm just saying put your sticks down.

For the first and only time to date, all of the nations that make up the British Isles qualified, Wales doing the best of all of them and reaching the Quarter Final, where they were defeated by Brazil. Some 17 year old fella got the only goal of the game, his name isn't that important, unless you'd like some diamonds that have been made from human hair or would like a prediction ahead of the upcoming World Cup.

Just Fontaine scored the most ever goals scored in a single tournament by one player (13), although he scored four of them in the 3rd/4th place playoff, I'm not sure how much they can really count. The 3rd/4th place playoff is like that last day of school when you're allowed to bring toys in (or sometimes you got to watch a VHS, on the TV/Video on wheels, of an old 80's kids film). There's always tons of goals, nobody cares about defending, there's more goals than you can... I'm kidding I'm not starting that again.

1962
When I watch videos and read books about World Cups in the past I often wish I'd been around to see them. In the case of 1962 I don't. Brazil won AGAIN (enough with the World Cup winning Brazil it's becoming tiresome) and from what I read the competition was spoilt by rough/violent play on the field.

One example of this is what has been dubbed The Battle of Santiago between Chile and Italy. Personally I find the whole episode a little boring (a chapter of the book I'm currently reading was based on it and I genuinely considered skipping it). I'll summarise for those of you that aren't as au fait. In the build up to the game, two Italian journalists write an article on Chile saying it's a dump and all the women are prostitutes (I'm assuming the "dump" impression came from the fact that there had been a devastating earthquake a year or so before the tournament, can't speak regarding the comment on the women). Chilean folk are naturally outraged by the whole thing, some poor Argentine reporter has the crap beaten out of him in a bar as he's mistaken for an Italian journalist. Anyway the match comes along and from the word go the Chileans proceed to kick lumps out of the Italians, both on and off the ball. The Italians retaliate and end up having two players sent off. At one point a player fully right hooks his opponent to the ground (breaking his jaw, I think). The ref basically allows a lot of this to go unpunished making the game even more bad tempered. Oh and Chile win 2-0. Not a great World Cup moment in my eyes.

In addition to Chile an Italy scrapping with each other, other acts of violence on the field saw (the names escape me) a Yugoslav player break the leg of a Russian (going unpunished) who then died 8 years later from cancer caused by the complications of the leg break and subsequent surgery; and Garrincha. Sorry let me explain, in case you've never heard of Garrincha. He was basically Brazil's best player in 1962, who managed to be one of the best players of all time despite having bowed legs (one was even shorter than the other) and infamously lost his virginity to a goat aged 14, killed his mother in law in a car accident, impregnated a Swedish girl while on tour in Sweden and sadly died in 1983 from alcohol related issues. He was a more extreme Balotelli, 50 years earlier. Anyway Garrincha was getting kicked and hacked so badly in the semi finals, he ended up retaliating, getting sent off and suspended for the final. "Oh no! How do Brazil cope in the final without their best player?" I hear you say. Well they just pleaded with FIFA. I'm not 100% sure as to how it all went down, but after some discussion between Brazilian delegates and FIFA delegates he was allowed to play the final, Laurent Blanc and Gazza should have done the same.

So to finish off this dour episode in the history of the World Cup (I'm honestly losing the will to type here), Brazil beat Czechoslovakia 3-1 in the final (by the way I can spell "Czechoslovakia" perfectly every time as a result of doing a degree in History and having to type the bloody word every 5 minutes in essays, the rest of my spelling can be suspect, as you've probably noticed). The Czech keeper, who had been blinding all tournament, had a mare and gifted them two of the goals. That's all you're getting for 1962!

1966
1966 was when we did the business. England delivered! We proved we were the best team in the world! Yeeeeaaah that's what happened...

From what I've seen, the 1960's didn't produce classic World Cup tournaments. I mean there were only two (62 & 66) but I get the impression that unless you live in Brazil or England you'll probably struggle to find positive accounts of either tournament.

First of all Brazil, the reigning champions were booted out of the tournament in 1966, 1962 style. Pele limped off in their first game against Hungary and said he'd never play in the World Cup again (liar). Brazil followed Pele and crashed out in the first round. As did Italy who were beaten 1-0 by North Korea in one of the biggest shocks in World Cup history. Apparently on their return to Italy the players were pelted with rotten tomatoes at the airport! Brilliant! Everybody get down to Heathrow for the 26th of June! Bring some old veg... (or fruit, I know that tomatoes are fruits).

Best manager we've ever had!

I don't want to take anything away from England, they were a good side at the time (although they were probably even stronger in 1970) but they got some questionable decisions during the tournament. For example the quarter final against Argentina. A game where Alf Ramsey the England manager, who the more I read about him sounds more like Alf Garnett, labelled the Argentines "Animals". The Argentine captain was sent off by the referee for "the look in his eye". I'm all for disciplining players for dissent but can we really send people off for giving a dirty look? In a World Cup quarter final? Apparently the ref didn't even speak Spanish, so Rattin (the Argentine captain) couldn't have said something offensive. And then there was the crossbar and down "goal" in the final, fair enough it's technically 1-1 after the Lampard indecent in 2010, but all I keep hearing from numerous sources is that there was no way it went in and the linesman only gave it because of experiences of Russians at the hands of German troops during the 2nd World War, or something like that?!? I've even heard  that Ex-FIFA president Jao Havelange claims that the 66 World Cup was fixed. Saying that, he had an agenda when he made those claims and, like Pele, he has a touch of the "batty old Brazilian man" about him.

Anyway England beat Germany 4-2 in the final, "Here comes Hurst. He's got... Some people are on the pitch they think it's all over..." and all that. We won! Eusebio was top scorer in the competition, playing for Portugal, this included FOUR in a comeback from 3-0 down to 5-3 against North Korea in the quarter finals. Now that's more goals than you can shake a stick at!

I'm done with this for now, next week we'll move on to the far more exciting 1970's and more rotten fruit for the Italians.

To finish let's take some time to appreciate some more of "Jogi" Löw's wardrobe

Bit of an assassin look going on here 

Nice fitted shirt

I like to call this look "Winter"

The State Of Football: November 2013 - Cocaine, The New Metatarsal

I started writing this blog post a few months ago but never got around to finishing it. I always start typing when the Mrs is watching X-Factor or some other reality show but then end up getting distracted, usually by the Serie A/La Liga/Ligue 1 game that I have one the go on my laptop. Tonight I find myself raging after watching a ridiculously poor performance from West Ham and have decided to take a break from football, and therefore have no distractions, other than X-Factor in the background (which isn't much of a distraction for me).

What I want to talk about are the observations that I've made lately that are things that I feel didn't exist say five years ago and are very much common place in football in the year 2013.

"Cocaine is a hell of a drug"

"Cocaine Injuries"
I spoke about Tomas Rosicky's ongoing injury problems a few blog posts ago and alluded to the fact that I've been told by a few people who have a mate that's in the know (I'm sure you all know someone like this, their best mate is next door neighbours with Nani or their brother's girlfriend's sister is going out with Junior Hoilett *sigh*) that Rosicky was absent from the Arsenal starting lineup not because of a muscle, bone, joint or ligament injury but because of a cocaine addiction. I've since heard that Jack Wilshere and Andy Carroll have both spent time off due to addictions to the white stuff (apparently Andy Carroll is still off as a result); the whole thing makes me think of the spate of metatarsal injuries that we had around 10 years ago. Let's hope we're not all going have to pray and rub our noses around April/May of next year in the hope that Jack can be fit for the World Cup squad.

Swapping shirts at half time
What?!? When did we start doing this? I can understand when people do it in meaningless friendlies between Brazil and Nigeria at Loftus Road; when they're probably going to make 11 substitutions each at half time. I'd want to nab Neymar's shirt. But when you're 3-0 down in a La Liga game at the Bernabeau at  Ronaldo has already dicked all over you don't make his head bigger by running over and being like, "Oh Christiano you're so amazing, can I have your shirt por favour (I know the lingo in La Liga)?" Especially when you've got another 45 minutes of trying to catch him and give him a kicking without he or any of his team mates having enough evidence to wave the imaginary card at the ref. You've got a job to do! I wouldn't go up to my boss at lunchtime and ask if we can swap ties (I probably wouldn't do it at 5pm either though, he'd think I'd lost it)!! Stop it!

4-6-0 and the false nine
Right, I've got loads of ammo for this one as I've just watched us (West Ham) lose to the worst, scrap that they can't be the worst because they're clearly better than us, one of the worst team's in the Premier League. I need to clear things up for misinformed football fans who seem to think we're playing this formation for tactical reasons or out of arrogance after the Sp*rs game. West Ham United have no strikers. We play nobody up front because we have NOBODY to play up front (unless we play one of our youth players). We released a player in the summer because he wasn't good enough in our eyes (Carlton Cole) and then had to beg him to re-sign with us because we have no alternatives (damn you cocaine, you stole Andy Carroll, according to my mate's dad's neighbour who goes to Zumba classes with Andy Carroll's mum)! If I was Carlton Cole I'd have said, "Yeah, you want me back do you Sam? £500k a week!" We'd have probably paid it, what other options do we have? Play 6 midfielders, one of whom does nothing other than walk around arguing with anything that can speak (Nolan), 2 of whom are wingers who want to just cross the ball at any opportunity (to the 0 in the middle of the box) and then bang long balls up to nobody when we run out of ideas? So just to recap, we're not trying to be defensive, clever or arrogant, we're not Spain or Barca, we have no other option!

Beating up Joe Hart
Joe Hart is a great goalkeeper, OK maybe not a great goalkeeper, he's a very good goalkeeper. Can we stop trying to crucify him for every mistake he makes (and goals where her couldn't have done anything better). Maybe it's because I'm a goalkeeper, I can't stand it when people pick on goalkeepers, we can't afford to make mistakes like you outfielders do and most of the time we'll go game after game not putting a foot wrong, but do you remember that? No! People need to start pointing fingers at Nastasic and Javi Garcia and not relishing the fact that City are now playing Pantymillion over our England's true number 1.

Roma
Roma are pretty awesome at the moment. Well I say that but I fear they may have peaked a few weeks ago and aren't as good as they were when Totti and Gervinho were fit. For those of you that don't follow the Italian league (what the hell are you doing with your lives) Roma are basically doing an Arsenal; every week they win and everyone says, "No they can't win the league, it's too early, they haven't played anyone decent yet..." I suppose Inter, Napoli, Tottenham and Liverpool aren't decent then no? For those of you that don't follow Serie A you also need to be made aware that Gervinho has actually been good. I kid you not, not only does he sound like he should be Brazilian, he now looks like it too.

BT Sport and the Sunday Night Football Show
Today I had a little rant on Twitter. I actually had two if you count the swearing that preceded the conclusion West Ham v Norwich game. The first of my rants was with regard to the fact the BT Sport have now bought the rights to the Champions League from 2015 onwards, meaning that there will be no more Champions League on terrestrial TV. I'm not going to go into the rights and wrongs of it all and spout off about the continual movement of football away from the fans in the interests on big corporations who claim that they are doing it all with the aim of providing an amazing service at a great price but are actually just trying to make MORE money.

Anyway this isn't what I wanted to talk about, what I wanted to say, quite positively for BT Sport, is that as much as Michael Owen has got to be one of the most boring sounding Co-Commentators EVER, up there with Mick McCarthy, they have got something right in the form of the Sunday Night Football Show presented by James Richardson. The program is brilliant and provides me with not only an alternative to the X-Factor Results Show but also decent coverage from Italy, France and Germany, a bit of educated football related "banter" (I hate that phrase) and a live game from one of the afore mentioned countries. Give it a watch.

Get one of these on at HT

Real Eagles
I'm  not quite sure when we started doing this? I didn't get the memo. But I've noticed that Crystal Palace, in an aim to look even more like one of those Eastern European teams whose fans you'd never want to bump into after the game, have decided to copy Lazio and get a REAL EAGLE in as their mascot?!? What the hell?!? An Eagle? It's bad enough that they already have "Ultras" and that teams all over England have started bringing those stupid pyro/smoke bomb things to games. It's Wigan v Barnsley, not Locomotive Moscow v Anzi Makachakalaka!! Back on the subject of the Eagle, what next? Are Hull going to bring a real Tiger down? Will Leicester maybe round up some of the local Foxes to go through the opposition team's bins and leave old rotten vegetables strewn across the away changing rooms? What the hell has the footballing world come to?

That isn't debris in the background...

40 Team World Cup
We already have a 24 team European Championship in 2016 and a road show scheduled for 2020 and Platini goes and wades in with this idea of a 40 team World Cup. Now don't get me wrong, I probably love the World Cup more than 99.999999% of people with wives/girlfriends on this planet, so I'd love it to last a bit longer, but at the same time he's not really given it any thought. Firstly if you have groups made up of uneven amounts meaning that in some of the final group games other teams will have already played and will know what result they need in order to go through (see Austria v West Germany 1982). Secondly, I keep saying this over and over and over, there are 9/10 teams that are members of CONMEBOL (the South American equivalent of UEFA) and they can potentially get 5 spaces at a World Cup. Conversely there 46 and 56 members of the AFC and CAF respectively and each of those federations get around 4 spaces each. And then people wonder why Asian and African teams haven't done that well in the past at the World Cup?? Surely we need to redistribute World cup spaces (including ones for UEFA, OFC and CONCACAF), if not in the interests of being fair, let's do it off the back of the randomness that teams from Africa bring to major international tournaments. In fact let's have a World Cup in Africa again soon (that'll p*ss off the racists), I feel like the last one we had wasn't crazy enough, by African Cup of Nations standards, I want to see a World Cup semi final where the grass on the pitch is so bad that they've (freshly) painted it green; and where there are so many flying insects on the field it looks like a story out of the bible. If you think I've gone off on a random tangent (which I slightly have) then check out the pictures from the Semis of the last African Cup of Nations, the above mentioned things actually happened. Anyway, to cut a long story short, leave it alone Platini!

Kaka
Kaka's back!! I'm assuming he still belongs to Jesus, none the less Jesus has let Milan have him for a while. And boy do they need him! For all of you that didn't know that Roma are currently the form team in Italy I have another bombshell for you. Milan are awful. The novelty of playing in Italy again has worn off for Balotelli and he's back to spending most of the games he plays walking around, occasionally diving and smashing penalties in. Robinho isn't doing much better, I kid you not, I can think of THREE instances this season where he's scuffed a ball that has been squared to him and missed an open goal. I mean who does that?? I'd have backed Carlton Cole to score the chances he's missed. As for the rest of the team, as much as I like Andrea Poli, Stephan El Shaarawy (or SES as I keep hearing him reffered to) and Riccardo Montolivo, in general the Milan squad is above average at best; and then there's Kaka. He scored a good goal against Lazio a couple of weeks ago, I've seen him come on and change games and dare I say it, I've even seen the "Kaka glide". The "Kaka glide" being the moment that he picks the ball up just inside the opposition half and gradually accelerates with it at his feet, effortlessly going past scrambling defenders (oooh it makes me feel like I'm 25/26 again), then when he gets to the box he plays a beautiful ball through...

...and Robinho scuffs it wide! Not quite 2007, but nice to see him doing what he does best.

...And finally, Podcasts
Just wanted to mention this because then it makes this a "Ten things". I'm really into football podcasts at the moment my week is pretty much dominated by them. If you take anything from this blog post make it what I'm about to tell you! If you like football and you can see past Match of the Day and the rest of the crap that the BBC and Sky Sports have to offer get involved in the following:-

• The Guardian Football Weekly & Football Weekly Extra (presented by James Richardson of channel 4 Football Italia fame)
• The Game - Times football podcast presented by Gabriele Marcotti (tied with James Richardson as my favourite pundit)
• The Football Ramble - One of the funniest football related things I've ever come across (after this blog obviously)
• Forza Italian Football - A very informative look into the worlds of Serie A & B
• Serie A Live Radio - Serie A from a North American perspective. Full of weird sound clips and Italian commentary (my Italian is getting better every day BTW); I'm not sure if it's intentional but they make me laugh every week, without fail
• Revista De La Liga - I know I slagged off Sky Sports at the top of this section, but this is actually quite good
• French Football Weekly - a decent podcast about the goings on in Ligue 1, all I have to say on it really

And that's it from me, it's all very Winter 2013. I'll try and get another post up soon and who knows, the next time I look at the state of football we might be travelling to games on hover-boards; by that point BT Sport and Sky Sports will be the only channels that show sports (even kids playing in the park) and the subscription fee will just be taken out of our pay packets without our say just like student loan repayments and national insurance. Money grabbing ****s!

Oh and BTW, I haven't said that any of the above mentioned players are on coke so don't sue me! This is just the word on the street...