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Showing content with the highest reputation on 09/05/2017 in Posts

  1. I met some Slovakia fans in the fanzone. They were all very friendly, when there was a band playing they started dancing and then I and a few England fans had a kickabout with them. Sometimes the ball landed in the band's area, they didn't care much though, just chucked it back. During the game, I was getting annoyed with our fans being quiet, even at 2-1 up the Slovakians were louder. I have to respect their fan base. Still, England won and it's another World Cup. In Britain, that starts with a draw sarcastically commentated over with Guy Mowbray, as we return to the studio with Gary Lineker and the MOTD crew saying "England will not progress/definitely progress from that group" (never an in-between), with the one African or Asian country being described as "tricky",before attention turns to the bigger match between Spain/France/Germany and Brazil/Argentina. The pre-World Cup friendlies come, we beat Denmark 2-1 and Bulgaria 1-0 but lose to Chile 3-1, this is overall hailed a success with things to work on by ITV and Southgate. Promo after promo, not withstanding a Panorama about Russian hooliganism which doesn't come to fruition at all, it finally starts with borderline racist ITV titles, overly-England focused BBC coverage ("So we've seen the opening match, Russia 0-0 Cameroon, what does that tell you about England's chances in Group G against Iran on Tuesday?"), an official World Cup song by Shakira to forget about, a much more viral song that we remember (waaaave your flag), everything in the universe being in the official font, with the official background, the BBC to introduce their fifth new scoreboard graphic in four years, and ITV to introduce an overly clunky one which exists for the sake of being in the same style of the titles, and England to come second in their group after an underwhelming win and a couple of worse draws (Draw 1, on ITV commentated by Clive Tyldsley: "We were unlucky but if we play like that we could go far" Draw 2 on the BBC: "What the fuck was that"), the Scottish media will criticise Tyldsley, not without merit, for being so biased towards England, but it doesn't matter, as we get knocked out of the Round of 16 by whoever won their group. In the quarter-finals, the dark horse who are living a "fairytale" will get knocked out by Germany, but only After Extra Time or maybe on penalties, and have made Asia/Africa (the whole continent, for some reason) proud. The semi-finals lead to the Third Place play-off, which will be on ITV like always, where Sam Matterface and Andy Townsend spend the whole time discussing why the play-off shouldn't exist, before an underwhelming final won 1-0 in extra time. The result allowing our quadrennial access to that is the main thing, no-one will remember this result in England or Slovakia. 2-1
    3 points
  2. Bolivia leading Chile in La Paz. Bolivia must be the biggest troll among South American nations with their altitude (all of their points came at home matches).
    2 points
  3. With the exception of fencing, every combat sports (boxing, wrestling, judo, TKD + weightlifting) only allow one athlete per country and per category during the olympics. You have to go back to 1924, to find a combat sport.(boxing) that allowed multiple entries per nation and per category. Same with the "boat sports" (cannoeing, rowing, sailing), which also allow only one athlete per nation and per boat. Here, you only need to go back to 2004 , to find one of these sport allowing multiple entries per boat (cannoeing slalom). It is also worth noting, that with the exception of women boxing and the longer boats (rowing eights, k4), these sports allready have more entrants that other sports that do allow multiple entries per country such as trampoline or women's BMX (16). Personnaly, I'm against this policy (oh... the surprise). Generally speaking, I think the overall international representation should take the back seat during the olympics and the focus to be put on the better athletes regardless of their nationality or continent. For instance, back in 2012, the future C1 slalom gold medallist (Tony Estanguet) had to beat the then current world champion (Denis Gargaud... future gold medal winner in Rio) during the french nationals just to make to London. Doest it makes sense to had one these two gold contenders stay at home to make room for a kazakh or chinese that very few cared about ? Does it make a better event ? Does it make for a better publicity for the sport ? I'm sure @hckosice could share some similar stories. Not every athletes will have has much patience, and many will drop the sport due to lack of oppurtunities, some will change nationallity, and in case of combat sports, some will go through hell just to make to a different weight category. I believe that you only need to relax this policy just a bit to make this whole qualification process much smoother and utimately to have a better sporting event .By exemple, if you allow only the top three nations in salom to have two entries per boat, that only means 12 athletes. An other exemple, in judo, you could allow two entries as long both athletes are ranked in the top 8 of their respective category, which would mean 15 athletes at the moment, etc. I think there is much to win here for a little cost. Thoughts ?
    2 points
  4. Right. 37 and finally making her Olympic debut then.
    2 points
  5. keep it and enforce it... I mean, I know that this is not fair to some great athletes, but nowadays you keep the Olympics at the center stage of sports in almost any Country because with this system also the smallest Nations can find 1 or 2 medals to celebrate every time... if we grant the top athletes in every discipline a start despite making a Country-based selection "a priori", the risk is that in most sports we're going to see in the medal table basically only the powerhouses in each discipline... so, I think an event like the Olympics need to keep this rule in place in order to give to more smaller Countries more chances to keep their interest in the Games (which would drop drastically if most of them can't even find 1 or 2 athletes in the a final of the whole program)... for instance, I can tell you for sure that here in Italy if we wouldn't be regularly up in the top 10 of the Olympic Medal Table, no attention would be given by the media to the Olympics (and we are already now always at risk of not having enough tv coverage for the Games, especially the Winter Games, which are normally less successful for us and because winter sports are not followed in large part of our Country)...
    2 points
  6. 1 point
  7. phelps

    Italy National Thread

    fidati, il ritorno della Diouf fa più danni di qualsiasi defezione...sia in campo che nel "gruppo"... con la "gatta di marmo" non si va da nessuna parte...
    1 point
  8. Olympics is a global competition, and the fun in the thing is watching athletes for all over the world compiting. For me, it adds more to the event having a girl from Cambodia over 3 hours in marathon than the chance of having the worlds 50 fastest kenyans racing. Giving rich countrys the chance of upraising their chances takes the spirits of the games away.
    1 point
  9. I agree that top 4-6 athletes should always be in Olympics regardless of nation, but dismiss those "Chinese or Kazakh athletes that nobody cares for" (like somebody mentioned here before) and it's no longer the Olympics for me. Let's take such an undeveloped sport as Canoeing slalom and remove those asian/african/small-oceanian quotas and you are left just with a smaller part of Europe + US/CAN/AUS. Is this really an event that deserves to be kept in Olympics then? NO! And if you disagree - then why just stop with canoeing slalom? Let's remove all of the continental quotas from basketball and let's have 4 teams from USA, 2 from Spain, 2 from Serbia, 2 from Lithuania and 2 from Argentina, because let's be real - who cares if Africa or Asia sends a team to basketball tournament... And let's have 60 out of 64 archers from South Korea, instead on wasting archery quotas on Slovakia or Finland... And my favourite Table tennis - 100% Chinese NOC, because let' be realistic - all top 180 players in China will be way stronger than any other table tennis player around the world. I understand that I'm overreacting here, I'm just not a fan of isolating poor countries from opportunity to participate at the Olympics.
    1 point
  10. Imposed from IOC. After Sydney 2000 the situation of canoe slalom was probably the worst, in fact canoe slalom was (is and will be) always under threat, because the organizers for some reason try to build supermodern extremely expensive venues and the same thing happened with Athens 2004, the situation became so dramatic that there signs that the competitions will not even being held few moths before the start of the games, even ICF gave up, but only after immediate strong lobbying from SVK, CZE, FRA, GER and GBR ICF started to "fight" to save the sport. But then had to submit doing some compromises with IOC regarding huge reduction of quotas and in order to still have larger worldwide representation they created this rule 1 boat per country since Beijing... so because of this in Rio 2016 for example the canoe slalom competitions were without olympic champions Štěpanka Hilgertová, the Hochschorner Bros, Elena Kaliská, Emilie Fer world champions Vavřinec Hradílek, Jasmin Schornberg or as you know Boris Neveu etc..
    1 point
  11. Very strange qualification system.. impossible to follow whitout read all rules
    1 point
  12. Syrian players are celebrating/crying like they are qualified for the World Cup. , I highly doubt they can win the playoffs but that's still a huge success for them. Syria used to even barely qualify for the Asian Cup ! let alone thinking about going to the World Cup during the war. A Syria-USA would be interesting in the playoffs and Syria should win 3-0 since Trump travel ban won't let Syrian players entering the US !
    1 point
  13. At the moment it's again. I want to sleep.
    1 point
  14. I really don't know. We should ask our coach, Christoph Daum because another coach qualified this team to EURO 2016. He called to national team players who don't play at their teams and let home the players in shape. We can't understand what the fuck he's doing. I guess he don't know as well. He should go home and let someone else because he is not a coach. It's a fucking disgrace what he did so far. The federation think if he's german we will play like Germany, but no, they choose a man who really don't know what to do with a national team. Ok, he won the championship in Turkey with Fenerbahce, but you can't compare a club work with national team job. He said list night that he won't give up. I'm afraid someone will fuck him on the street if he won't go, because we can't take this anymore. Media said today that Hagi is on the list to replace him. Let's see what federation think about a replacement. PS: Also all federation staff should be replaced. Btw, I see Argentina is 5th in the qualifications, the life isn't so good for you as well (but I think your team will be in Russia next year)
    1 point
  15. well, first all shooters have to shoot 2*25 (50) shots in the qualifying round... then the guy and the girl's scores are added together and this is the final score for each team (pair)... top 6 pairs go through to the semifinal stage, where there are 2 groups with 3 pairs each... they have to shoot once again 25 targets (both the guy and the girl) and the addition of their scores makes the final result for the team... winners from each group advance to the gold medal match, 2nd pair in each group go to the bronze medal match... medal matches are again a long 25+25 shots series for both teams...the highest combined score (man + woman) is the eventual winner of the match... as you can see, the procedure is very long and sometimes also very boring... in my opinion, to make it a bit more exciting they should buil a direct match ups draw with the top 8 teams instead of that senseless semifinal stage and, bove all, shorten up the medal match ups...
    1 point
  16. Canadian Doug Mason is once again the new coach of the dutch men´s ice hockey national team http://www.iihf.com/home-of-hockey/news/news-singleview/?tx_ttnews[tt_news]=11996&cHash=60022265655da5c1083d336bffd0e609
    1 point
  17. They deserved to win, but the ref fucked them with that wrong off-side Plus they had bad luck when they hit the bar
    1 point
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