| S.Peelman said: This is why those final games of the group stage were misleading. I'm actually quite disappointed that apparently none of those that were already qualified after two matches did their sportive duty; sending out B-teams and not caring. This resulted in others being eliminated while winning their own final matches, and sure you can say teams like Uruguay and Germany shouldn't have let it get as bad as it did in the first place, but I'm still disappointed that apparently there's little will to win if you don't have to. Like, if they were a match in the knock-out round, France-Tunesia, Spain-Japan, Brazil-Cameroon and Portugal-South Korea would've been 3, 4, 5-0 each. |
Eh. Personally I'd much rather these smaller teams eliminating big teams in the group stage only to fall short in the first knockout round, than this becoming another glorified Euro like in 2018.
And it's not like they've been all bad, either. Korea looked bad yesterday, but you have to consider they were right off the heels of giving their everything and more against Portugal, whereas the Brazilian players had a whole week's rest before the game. Senegal was bad but they were missing many key players. Australia was bad but they at least kept the scoreline interesting. Poland was bad but we should ignore that because they're european. But. Morocco is giving Spain a tough game right now, and Japan was arguably better than Croatia yesterday, a shame they took their penalties with the same level of confidence a cat has trying to eat food from the corner of the plate.
