Spectrumglr said:
this thread is doomed from the very beginning...but i guess that being from the US doesn't help much when we talk about football (i mean the one that' actually played with feet not the one that's played with hands). Ok, I'm from Italy so i'm not the right one to ask to but i think that you can never count out Italy from an important tournament.
1)actually Italy plays its best matches when everyone else thinks that we have no chance (ask Brazil in '82 or Germany in '06) and its worst when everyone think that's one of the possible winner (I still remebre Argentina in '90 and Korea in '02).
2)even if you play the best footbal in this world you still have to consiedr the fact that playing against a tough and experienced defense isn't a simple matter...France that easily won the world cup in '98 had its toughest match against us (they won at the penalty kicks), Brazil in '94 won at the penaly kiks and the same goes for Spain in the last Euro tournament (the played great footbal against everyone except for Italy)...to win a game you have to score at least a Goal and I can assure you that one thing is scoring to Italy in friendly/lesser important match and another thing is doing the same in a World Cup. I really don't know why but it must be in our DNA: we do our best only (and sadly i should add) when it's really important (ok, we're talking about footbal so imprtant is probably not the right word but you get the point)
having stated this i think that England has the gratest chance to win this world cup....but they had to hire an italian coach to learn the simple lesson that when you can't count on at least 4 phenomenal players (like Brazil almost every world Cup or France in '98) the first and most important rule in Footbal is just avoiding the opposing teams to score (we say "primo non prenderle" (First don't get beaten).
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I know this is a bit late, but seriously...shut it. That's about the most pretentious thing I've read recently. I'm a football fan, regardless of where I come from. I like the sport. And even if I didn't, I read the opinions of hundreds of other football fans. You wouldn't know that, however, because you refused to read (must come with being Italian or something).
