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Originally Posted by demonrail666
And Uraguay seem to be the dictionary definition of a one-man team. With Forlan, they're barely average. Without him, God knows.
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URUguay.
i disagree with this. they have a good defense-- they've always been a team that's strong on defense, and plays rough (as proven today). they are not an extraordinary team by all means, they qualified only in the... "repechaje", i don't know how you call this in english, but they didn't make it in the south american group and had to play costa rica from the shitty concacaf group in order to make it. but they are capable of playing well. it's their offense that hasn't gelled, hence forlan was the lone attacker. suarez disappointed. but i think they can beat mexico, as mexico has a better offensive midfield but is rather ineffectual when it's time to score. uruguay is the opposite (or should be, if their star strikers get their shit together). today their midfield really sucked on the attack but did ok on containing france, & their best player was the goalkeeper. let's see what develops though, south africa was way improved in the 2nd half and i now see some hope for them.
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Originally Posted by demonrail666
I'll be honest, I didn't notice any controversy with those. Maybe your coverage picked it up better than ours. I'll have a look at the highlights. On the whole though, in both matches, I thought the referees did fine. Not that either game was particularly bad tempered. It'll be interesting to see how they deal with teams like Argentina or Italy, neither of whom, I think it's fair to say, are the most altruistic of sides.
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it's not in most "highlights", but as soon as it's up on youtube i'll pin it down for you & you can judge. here they repeated it & showed closeups of the fouls & bad calls. this is not to forgive that hatchet job on sagna, by the way, which deserved a red card on its own.
ok, see here:
http://www.fifa.com/live/competition...453/index.html
go to "play by play" tab & see in min 64 "evra concedes a free kick"-- that was a yellow card offense and the ref "forgave" him. there were other fuckups, but i didn't record the video to point them out.
the first set of referees (from uzbekistan or krygistan, i forget) were impeccable, very nice job.
ok see you guys tomorrow for argentina nigeria. no offense to greece, but i'm not waking up at 5am to watch them play korea.