You’ve Got To Be Fast

What with everyone and their uncle taking their cue from the Little Red Book of Mourinho and Allerdyce (2 banks of four, midfield holding player, 10 men minimum behind the ball in the final third as soon as you lose possession, blah, blah, blah), there really is only one way to break teams down. That is to own the transition between gaining possession and scoring, the incendiary moments before the opposition can get their shit together. That means you have to break fast, move fast, pass fast, confuse the opposition and score. It means pretty constant movement off the ball to show yourself to your teammates and pull the defence out of position to create openings. Think of the way Man U, Aresenal and Chelsea can break from defence to goalscoring  in 5 – 10 seconds and the power, pace, accuracy and style that requires. So far no team here has shown they are capable of or even aspire to this quality of football to any significant degree. After the German’s demolition of Oztralia, this was the second best match so far.

What A Goal!

And when you do it right, it is awesome. For the first (only) time in the entire game we saw a Brazillian attacking the Koreans at speed and a nice direction changing pass from Elano to Maicon (second only to Robinho’s pass to Elano for the second goal). This provided the clear space for Maicon to shoot. And goals win games. Once you’re ahead, it’s a completely different match as the opposition has to chase the game and opens up their tightly maxed out defence. Now we’ve not seen many good goals so far, the killer strike of Tshabalala with the fantastic defence splitting pass setting it up being the pick of the moments to date, but this eclipsed even that. Killer strike.

Kudos To The Koreans – They Have Balls Of Steel

Unlike many of the low grade, whining, fouling, lazy, pig-dog ugly teams we’ve seen so far (Oztralia, Slovenia, Algeria, New Zealand, Slovakia, Denmark, Paraguay, and the whole of Group A hang your fucking heads in shame), the Koreans haven’t flinched, fouled or played the crying showpony. Nor have they simply shut up shop like some qualitiless, lower league Fat Sam Allerdyce team. Instead they defended effectively, attacked when they had the ball and never let up. If only they didn’t live in a place ruined by a fucked up, four-eyed moron and his spastic cadres, they might have  a fully fledged country by now. In any other group they would have a very real chance of getting into the knock out phase. Portugal and Ivory Coast think all they need to do is beat these guys and rack up the goals. After seeing their lacklustre game earlier I think both those teams should be very, very worried. This is, indeed, the Group of Death. The next round of matches is going to be fantastic, especially Portugal vs North Korea. I can see the table reading, Brazil 6, North Korea 3, Ivory Coast 1, Portugal 1. And then it really is Game On.

14 Down 50 To Go