LDOG

Victory over puerto rico and virtual qualification for WC. Only need one more win, but maybe not even that would be needed.

Of course, this is the worst result for me I wanted either ARG to win 3-0 or 3-1 so I would just be happy or SLO to win 3-2 because that was my prediction we have a saying for these situations: "without bread and without the cake".

Our team sucks, I hope they just lose already since even 3-2 victory is useless and we can't be more than 4th place now. Hope they lose tomorrow to Japan as well, no point playing a second round like this.

Yes, with Captain douchebag Heynen as coach you never know, but I don't think the option by being 2nd in the group is that much better: it would be USA, Bulgaria again and the 4th of group B which could also be France or Brazil. Bulgaria-Poland will be played at the same time as Canada-France, so it will be difficult for these teams to calculate while they are playing.

I imagine Dunadan must be a journalist or a huge statistics nerd watching sports 24/7 with multiple screens for all the simultaneous streams how can someone have such deep knowledge of every sport in the planet?

Fantastic, I can already see our team in that second round group with Poland, Russia and France

Argentina was losing by 8 point difference in 4th set (produced almost entirely by a single great serve turn from Zaytsev) but almost won the set even had 2 set points! Too sad for this loss and that we don't take any points from this match. It's weird to say this in sports like tennis or volleyball where you only can win by scoring a fixed amount of points, but I really think our team played great and "deserved" more. They were only beaten by very specific circumstances like two good italian serve streaks on the 2nd and 4th sets and a questionable call in the 3rd one.

Referee stole our team the 3rd set... match over now.

Italian players should really stop trying to hit everything hard and think a little more.

Sorry, why was Russia not considered favorite in this thread?

Most wealthy people support him, it's no surprise.

Argentina released the team list today (I won't post it cuz it's too long and nobody here is really interested in it ). We'll have 141 athletes participating in all sports except for Acrobatic Gymnastics and Diving. The flag bearer will be Dante Cittadini (sailing, Nacra 15). IMO a bit unfair that his girl partner with whom he has won many titles recently isn't also picked as "joint-flag bearer", but whatever, our NOC aren't the brightest minds...

At least in the case of prime ministers/presidents it's common protocol that they should speak their own language even in big international meetings (only in interviews they tend to adapt to the language of the interviewer). It's not that they necessarilly don't know english or other lenguage. For example, Putin knows many languages but rarely speaks in something that isn't russian.

Wow I thought dominican was the weakest team in the competition but seems like not.

lol our girl in skeet missed a whooping 11 shots (!) today and dropped from 2nd to nowhere. Silver lining for us is that USA qualified all 3 shooters for the final.

Ok, Djokovic was solid and delpo made UE in almost every important point he had. Disappointing final. Unfortunately delpo just doesn't have the body to compete with a Nadal/Djokovic as long as they are in their prime. Number 4 in ranking is the best he can be for now.

Actually there isn't much difference in UEs. The big difference is return: delpo only 66% points won with 1st serve, which for him is VERY bad, Djokovic defense is full gear today.

Not my language but probably some weird pronounciation like "weelch". In many words portuguese sounds funny from our point of view

Two questions: What would have happened if there was rainy weather in Rome today? Why all the other teams must wait 3 days to play their first match??

The champion will be France, Russia or less likely USA. Brazil doesn't have chance to be champions this time, but still should get top 6 finish. Italy who knows... I see them making semis but I also could see them losing a group game...

I didn't watch the match but I understand all this happened just because of some coaching warning? I fail to see the connection between that and sexism, are there statistics that show that women get this type of warning more often than men or something?

^The thing about equestrian is that the kids won't use their own horses but ones provided by the organization, so the results will be pretty random to an extent.

It's very difficult to predict the men's final for me. Novak has only played nobodies and Nishikori (who just doesn't have the aggresive tennis needed to beat him) until now and delpo hasn't played any high level player either (Isner is special and Rafa got injured in like 4 games). The few times delpo managed to defeat Djokovic in the past he served and hammered forehand like crazy all match. Sounds weird but I think it depends more on delpo than on Djokovic, the latter is no mystery: he will just play his usual super-consistent tennis and defend, defend, defend. Delpo must break that if he wants to win.

Yes, we get it, India is good. We realised by the 24th post you made about it.

Botswana should have won. Of those 4 it's currently the most stable country.