March 28, 2024, 05:25:39 AM

Author Topic: UEFA Euro Thread.  (Read 241884 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Tiresais

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 2817
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2520 on: June 23, 2021, 03:44:15 AM »
Italy have a real chance. People thought I was nuts for saying they were contenders before the tournament. France imploding from within and Germany unimpressive. England and Portugal same old

Offline injunchile

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 1973
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2521 on: June 23, 2021, 07:32:33 AM »
All This Hype About England- Disappointing. Italy is the dark horse in this Race . Germany seems to get it right. Still Looks like France or Denmark

Offline asylumseeker

  • Moderator
  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 18073
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2522 on: June 26, 2021, 03:43:36 AM »
The Two Ciro Immobiles
By Rory Smith, The New York Times


The raw facts are, on the surface, overwhelming. In the last five seasons, Ciro Immobile has scored 26 goals, then 41 goals, followed by 19, 39 and 25. Over the course of that run, he has won the Golden Boot — the prize given annually to Europe’s most prolific goal-scorer — once, and tied the record for the most goals scored in a single season in Italy’s top league, Serie A.

The context of those facts only serves to embellish them. Immobile does not play for an all-conquering superpower, the sort of team that carves out a dozen chances a game and regularly dispatches overmatched opponents by four- and five-goal margins. He plays, instead, for Lazio, a side constructed — by superclub standards — on a shoestring.

And he operates in Serie A, a league which no less an authority than Cristiano Ronaldo regards as the most difficult in the world in which to score goals. A league in which Ashley Cole, among the greatest defenders of his era, was regarded as being surprisingly naïve, tactically.

The conclusion, then, should be obvious. Immobile, 31, belongs in the front rank of contemporary forwards, perhaps not quite an equal to the only four players in Europe’s major leagues to have scored more than him in the last five years — Lionel Messi, Ronaldo, Robert Lewandowski and Harry Kane — but not out of his depth in their company.

That, certainly, is how he looks up close. Simone Inzaghi, Immobile’s coach at Lazio for the last five years, regards him as “one of the three or five best attackers” in Italy in the last two decades. On his goal totals alone, he should have been in contention for a Ballon D’Or.

From a distance, though, everything changes. Immobile’s name is rarely mentioned when lists of the finest attackers of his era are compiled. On the eve of Euro 2020, the most pressing question asked of Italy’s coach was whether his team could hope to fare well in the tournament when it was lacking a top-class forward. And no, Immobile, the striker who had scored 123 goals in 177 games, did not count.

A few weeks ago, as the Italian season drew to a close, Immobile had a brief and vaguely unbecoming spat with Urbano Cairo, the president of Torino. Cairo had, at one time, regarded the forward as “a protégé.” It was a prolific season in Turin, in fact, that had first made Immobile one of Italy’s hottest properties.

But Cairo was annoyed to see Immobile, in his view, diving to win a penalty in a game between Torino and Lazio, so he waited for him by the locker room to make his feelings known. That night, Immobile posted a message to his Instagram account denying Cairo’s accusation. “Everybody knows who Ciro Immobile is,” he wrote.

He was almost right. Everybody thinks they know who Ciro Immobile is. It is just that not everybody thinks the same thing.

The Real Ciro

The conversation, as Monchi remembers it, was “very open, very honest, very mature.” Five months earlier, in July 2015, he had brokered the deal to bring Immobile to Sevilla from Borussia Dortmund. As Sevilla’s sporting director, Monchi had been looking for a third striker, one “with a different profile” from the two the club currently employed: the rangy Fernando Llorente and the explosive, hard-running Kevin Gameiro.

Immobile — who describes his own gifts as “strength, tenacity and cunning” — fit the bill. Monchi, renowned as among the shrewdest pilots of the transfer market, spotted the potential for a deal. Immobile’s service were no longer needed at Dortmund; Sevilla could obtain him on an initial loan, and later, and permanently, at a bargain price if he met certain performance clauses.

Instead, the striker would go down as one of Monchi’s rare missteps. He did not score his first goal for the club until November. He made only a handful of appearances. And then, early in January, he requested a meeting with Monchi and Unai Emery, the club’s coach at the time, to discuss his future.

Immobile explained that he felt he needed a change of scenery; he admitted that he was not performing as he should. “He was worried about the European Championship,” Monchi said of the 2016 tournament then looming just over the horizon. “He wanted to be in the Italy squad, and he knew that to do that he had to be playing. And he was not playing enough here.” Sevilla acquiesced, and allowed him to join Torino on loan.

“There are two reason transfers go wrong,” Monchi said. “One is that the player does not find the confidence they need at their new club, or in a new league. That is especially important for strikers. And the second is that the style of play of the team does not suit them. I think both applied to Ciro.” To him, it was just one of those things. He knows that, sometimes, deals just do not work out. He and Sevilla moved on.

For Immobile, the consequences lasted a bit longer. He had spent 18 months abroad, and they had been an unmitigated failure. At Dortmund, he would later say, he felt “unsupported” by the club. In eight months, he told Gazzetta dello Sport’s SportWeek magazine, not one of his teammates had invited him out for dinner.

Dortmund was “cold,” there was “nothing to do,” and while the coach who signed him, Jürgen Klopp, had insisted on providing him with a German translator, his replacement, Thomas Tuchel, removed that privilege, insisting on holding even one-on-one meetings in German, a language that Immobile found “impossible” to learn.

More pertinent, he found himself unable to cope with the weight of expectations. He had been pinpointed as a replacement for the Bayern Munich-bound Lewandowski and he sensed his predecessor’s gold-fringed shadow at every turn. “The error I made at Dortmund was that Lewandowski left and I felt the responsibility,” he said.

Immobile looks back on his time in Germany with regret. He and Klopp encountered each other at “the wrong time in their careers,” he has said. Had the timing been different, been right, then he feels that Klopp’s percussive style would have suited him perfectly. As it was, Klopp never had chance — in Immobile’s words — to work with “the real Ciro.”

And yet, for many, that was precisely what Klopp, and later Monchi, had seen. Those unhappy 18 months came to define Immobile’s career, to set his reputation. No matter what he did afterward, no matter how many goals he scored in Italy, no matter what the context, the fact that he had failed in Dortmund and in Seville meant his fate was sealed. Everybody thought they knew who Ciro Immobile was.

Revenge

Until almost the last moment, the one part of Italy’s team that remained a mystery — to Roberto Mancini, its coach, as much as anyone — was the attack.

Over the course of his three years in charge of the national side, Mancini has experimented with various systems, and various options: the young Moise Kean and the experienced Fabio Quagliarella, the traditional Andrea Belotti and the unorthodox Federico Bernadeschi. From the outside, Mancini has looked, at times, like a man searching for a way not to play Immobile upfront.

That is not because Mancini doubts whether Immobile is right for international soccer — he has no doubts as to his ability — but if international soccer is right for him. “If we played 38 games over the season, Ciro would score 25 goals,” Mancini said a few weeks before naming his squad for Euro 2020. “It is tougher when you only join up two or three times a year.”

That is as close to a consensus as there is on Immobile: He can be devastating, but he needs everything to feel just right, on the field and off it. At Lazio, he has found it. Inzaghi designed the team to suit Immobile’s strengths, deploying Luis Alberto and Joaquin Correa as foils for his darting runs, his elusive movement, his hunter’s instinct.

Just as important, his family is settled in Rome. He feels valued by the club — Lazio’s president, Claudio Lotito, organized a private audience with the Pope a few months ago — and he has a grander animating force.

In 2020, when Immobile won the Golden Boot, the first player not based in Spain to win the prize since 2014, he admitted that it was “a kind of revenge.” Quite who he was taking it on was not clear — it was “not against anyone personally,” he said — but it seemed fair to read it as a riposte to all who doubted him, who took the disappointments of Dortmund and Seville as shorthand for his career, who did not see the player that Immobile saw in himself.

That award, perhaps, started to shift the debate in his favor just a little. Five goals in five games in the Champions League last season will have helped, too; that is the stage, after all, on which soccer now ordains greatness, and it has been to Immobile’s detriment that he has graced it only rarely.

Euro 2020, then, offers him a precious chance to prove his point, to demonstrate that Italy does have a forward fit for a place among the elite, that all of those goals cannot just be written off as circumstantial evidence. He may, yet, be allowed a little autumnal afterglow to bathe his career.

The group stage brought two goals in two starts on home soil. The knockout rounds, starting with Austria on Saturday, are an opportunity to build his case. All he needs to do is what he has been doing, with a relentless consistency, for the last five years: scoring goals, making the raw facts of the matter overwhelming.
« Last Edit: June 26, 2021, 03:46:59 AM by asylumseeker »

Offline Peong

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 7410
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2523 on: June 26, 2021, 02:54:54 PM »
Italy not playing well against Austria's disciplined back 4. Anybody's game after 90.

Entertaining extra time, big effort from both sides. Italy move on.
« Last Edit: June 26, 2021, 03:36:09 PM by Peong »

Offline asylumseeker

  • Moderator
  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 18073
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2524 on: June 26, 2021, 06:29:32 PM »
That Chiesa goal was textbook Luca Toni.

Offline asylumseeker

  • Moderator
  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 18073
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2525 on: June 27, 2021, 11:30:55 AM »
Piss poor defending by the Orange on that free kick. Also horrible decision-making by the GK.

Offline asylumseeker

  • Moderator
  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 18073
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2526 on: June 27, 2021, 11:57:34 AM »
Adiós, Frank de Boer Boo.  The Netherlands is a team easy to support or wish well, but so good at self-inflicted wounds.

Offline lefty

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 5888
  • would u like to buy an 'O'.........
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2527 on: June 27, 2021, 02:01:36 PM »
T. Hazard put in one hell of a belter to give Belgium the lead
I pity the fool....

Offline asylumseeker

  • Moderator
  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 18073
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2528 on: June 27, 2021, 02:42:57 PM »
Ah wonder if having Renato Sanches in Fort Lauderdale for three days would work wonders before Montserrat.

Offline lefty

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 5888
  • would u like to buy an 'O'.........
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2529 on: June 27, 2021, 02:59:43 PM »
Belgium inside, some poor final passes made it closer than it should maybe have been, but Portugal had dey chances to even take this
I pity the fool....

Offline lefty

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 5888
  • would u like to buy an 'O'.........
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2530 on: June 28, 2021, 02:21:58 PM »
high drama alyuh France v Switzerland   :duel:  :duel:
I pity the fool....

Offline lefty

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 5888
  • would u like to buy an 'O'.........
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2531 on: June 28, 2021, 02:41:05 PM »
high drama 3-2 game on
I pity the fool....

Offline lefty

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 5888
  • would u like to buy an 'O'.........
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2532 on: June 28, 2021, 02:50:24 PM »
3-3 :challenge: :duel: :duel: entertainment! entertainment! entertainment!
I pity the fool....

Offline lefty

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 5888
  • would u like to buy an 'O'.........
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2533 on: June 28, 2021, 03:49:11 PM »
d swiss pull it off, good game
I pity the fool....

Offline Deeks

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 18631
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2534 on: June 29, 2021, 06:37:33 AM »
The best thing that happened to France. Plus Mbappe was mentally out of it. Let us see how they adjust for the WC.

Offline Soup

  • New Warrior
  • *
  • Posts: 1
    • View Profile
Euro 2021 round of 16 recap
« Reply #2535 on: July 01, 2021, 12:13:54 PM »
https://youtu.be/IItsjLZEBl8 I heard some say they not seeing much on the euros. ;)

Offline asylumseeker

  • Moderator
  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 18073
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2536 on: July 02, 2021, 03:25:39 PM »
Insigne with the poison! Forza Italia  ::) and arriverderci Belgio! Martinez nutten!   :devil:

Offline kounty

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 3153
  • Truthfulness is brighter than the light of the sun
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2537 on: July 02, 2021, 04:12:59 PM »
I like Peru brand. Who say Peru for the Copa?  :challenge:

Offline Peong

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 7410
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2538 on: July 02, 2021, 09:16:32 PM »
Well the round of 16 was a wild ride, 1/4s going damn good too.
Insigne skip past Tellaman and just smash it yes. No keeper was saving that. What a performance by Italy.

Offline soccerman

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 4659
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2539 on: July 06, 2021, 09:57:10 PM »
Three games went to pk shootouts today, all the excitement felt like Christmas morning

Offline soccerman

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 4659
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2540 on: July 07, 2021, 03:51:46 PM »
That was not a pen on Sterling

Offline Deeks

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 18631
    • View Profile
Re: You'll realize....
« Reply #2541 on: July 07, 2021, 11:48:58 PM »
The English says the cup coming Home. The Italians say the cup going to Rome!!!

Offline Flex

  • Administrator
  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 18062
  • A Trini 4 Real.
    • View Profile
    • Soca Warriors Online
Re: UEFA Euro Thread.
« Reply #2542 on: July 08, 2021, 04:13:48 AM »
UEFA invites Christian Eriksen and medics who saved his life to Euro 2020 final
Liz Roscher (Yahoo Sports)


The Euro 2020 final is scheduled for Sunday (England vs Italy), and UEFA is trying to get several very important people to be there.

UEFA has invited Denmark's Christian Eriksen and the medics who saved his life to attend the final. Eriksen collapsed on the field during Denmark's match against Finland in the opening days of the tournament, resulting in some of the scariest moments we've seen in live sports. It initially looked like a simple stumble, but his teammates immediately realized something was seriously wrong and called over the medics, who found that Eriksen was not breathing. With his teammates forming a protective circle around them to shield them from view, the medics were able to resuscitate him.

Eriksen was immediately taken to the hospital where he underwent tests, while his teammates essentially had no choice but to continue their match against Finland. Doctors discovered that he'd gone into cardiac arrest, and inserted a heart starter before he was released. Since his collapse, Eriksen has sent a few updates via social media and official team communications, and visited his teammates before heading to his home to recuperate.

According to ESPN, UEFA invited Eriksen, his wife, and six medics to Sunday's final. There's been no word about who might attend, but at least one paramedic, Peder Ersgaard, has said that he plans to.

"I'm excited, like a child on Christmas Eve," he told Fagbladet FOA magazine via ESPN. "I'm very proud of my efforts, but also of the whole team. It wasn't a one-man effort."

After that incredibly frightening start (and losing that match against Finland), Denmark has rebounded. They'll be facing England in the semifinals on Wednesday, and a win would put them through to the final.


Denmark's Christian Eriksen could be present for the Euro 2020 final, less than a month after experiencing cardiac arrest on the field during an early match. (Photo by KOEN VAN WEEL/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

« Last Edit: July 08, 2021, 04:26:52 AM by Flex »
The real measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

Offline Peong

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 7410
    • View Profile
Re: UEFA Euro Thread.
« Reply #2543 on: July 08, 2021, 02:01:05 PM »
I dislike the English press when England are playing. Insigne and company, please dun dem.

Maybe if England win they will become more gracious. Or maybe they'll get worse, more smug and annoying.
Either way I hope it is a great game
« Last Edit: July 08, 2021, 02:09:22 PM by Peong »

Offline Brownsugar

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 10179
  • Soca in mih veins, Soca in mih blood!!
    • View Profile
Re: UEFA Euro Thread.
« Reply #2544 on: July 10, 2021, 04:12:59 PM »
Chups.....I looking for this thread since the tournament started.....double chups!!
"...If yuh clothes tear up
Or yuh shoes burst off,
You could still jump up when music play.
Old lady, young baby, everybody could dingolay...
Dingolay, ay, ay, ay ay,
Dingolay ay, ay, ay..."

RIP Shadow....The legend will live on in music...

Offline Brownsugar

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 10179
  • Soca in mih veins, Soca in mih blood!!
    • View Profile
Re: UEFA Euro Thread.
« Reply #2545 on: July 10, 2021, 04:15:04 PM »
I dislike the English press when England are playing. Insigne and company, please dun dem.

Maybe if England win they will become more gracious. Or maybe they'll get worse, more smug and annoying.
Either way I hope it is a great game

Please, oh please, oh pleeeeaaasseeee!!! :praying: :praying: :flamethrower: :duel: :challenge:
"...If yuh clothes tear up
Or yuh shoes burst off,
You could still jump up when music play.
Old lady, young baby, everybody could dingolay...
Dingolay, ay, ay, ay ay,
Dingolay ay, ay, ay..."

RIP Shadow....The legend will live on in music...

Offline Bitter

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 9689
    • View Profile
Re: UEFA Euro Thread.
« Reply #2546 on: July 11, 2021, 04:53:56 PM »
Death, Taxes and ...
Bitter is a supercalifragilistic tic-tac-pro

Offline asylumseeker

  • Moderator
  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 18073
    • View Profile
Re: UEFA Euro Thread.
« Reply #2547 on: July 12, 2021, 02:41:34 AM »
During the course of the tournament, I noticed that England had a base of supporters among Trinbagonians. This surprised me. I almost swear there was a moment in time when Trinbagonians "respected" English football but would NOT support an English team.

Offline Deeks

  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 18631
    • View Profile
Re: UEFA Euro Thread.
« Reply #2548 on: July 12, 2021, 08:11:48 AM »
During the course of the tournament, I noticed that England had a base of supporters among Trinbagonians. This surprised me. I almost swear there was a moment in time when Trinbagonians "respected" English football but would NOT support an English team.

I beg to differ asylum. Ever since I following football and that is from the mid 60s, England and the clubs teams have had a strong following. Just go back to the names of clubs of the past. Straight otta of England. But that did not mean everything was all English. South America and Brazil were very popular. The Brazilians fostered great fantasy. Garrincha and Pele and Di Stefano to an extent.

I think by 70/74 things started to change with satelite TV. We able to see games 74 WC live for the first time. So we started to see different countries and clubs. Bayern, Ajax, Madrid, the Milans, Juve, etc

But their is still a strong nostalgia for English football. Just ask those who grew up when Liverpool used to run thisngs in the late 70s and 80s. It have diehard pool fans in TT.
« Last Edit: July 12, 2021, 08:23:58 AM by Deeks »

Offline asylumseeker

  • Moderator
  • Hero Warrior
  • *****
  • Posts: 18073
    • View Profile
Re: UEFA Euro Thread.
« Reply #2549 on: July 12, 2021, 09:08:35 AM »
During the course of the tournament, I noticed that England had a base of supporters among Trinbagonians. This surprised me. I almost swear there was a moment in time when Trinbagonians "respected" English football but would NOT support an English team.

I beg to differ asylum. Ever since I following football and that is from the mid 60s, England and the clubs teams have had a strong following. Just go back to the names of clubs of the past. Straight otta of England. But that did not mean everything was all English. South America and Brazil were very popular. The Brazilians fostered great fantasy. Garrincha and Pele and Di Stefano to an extent.

I think by 70/74 things started to change with satelite TV. We able to see games 74 WC live for the first time. So we started to see different countries and clubs. Bayern, Ajax, Madrid, the Milans, Juve, etc

But their is still a strong nostalgia for English football. Just ask those who grew up when Liverpool used to run thisngs in the late 70s and 80s. It have diehard pool fans in TT.

I agree with that on a club level, but as far as NT support from 1970 on, I sensed that ppl were for Brazil or Argentina, maybe the Dutch at a point, France at a later point, maybe Germany a lil ... but England?

I'm curious how posters see this by decade. Maybe the ppl who came of age being suckled on the Premier League post-2000 have a different perspective on favoring England support.
« Last Edit: July 12, 2021, 12:25:09 PM by asylumseeker »

 

1]; } ?>