A Beautiful Thread for the Beautiful Game

The meme-tastic Icelandic commentator:

https://twitter.com/BeWarmers/status/747543974148210688?ref_src=twsrc^tfw

He always brings a smile to my face.

edited 27th Jun '16 4:23:01 PM by nightwyrm_zero

Absolute legend.

For anyone who missed the England/Iceland annihilation, here is a highly accurate summary, in the form of a single GIF

Del Bosque has decided to leave the Spanish national team.

Mexit... Blexit... Hodgxit... Del Bosquit...

So Gareth Southgate is the choice of the ex-Engerlund players-turned-pundits then. I guess they really don't want to do any better next time.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/jun/28/england-manager-gareth-southgate-roy-hodgson

From the same paper, here's some cartoons on the whole humiliating (for the Engerlish of course) saga:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/picture/2016/jun/28/david-squires-on-englands-euro-2016-exit-to-iceland

Snerkles at "Boat Trip Roy".

Shame that a GER-FRA Final is impossible.

A GER-FRA semi is far from certain to happen. Italy has been the most impressive team I have seen, and shutting down Spain like they did was no small feat. Meanwhile, beating Iceland is proving to be much harder than you expect it to be.

So neither France nor Germany is going to have easy QF.

x3 What is with the fetish for specifically an English manager? Just racism at work?

I was about to say "We've had two foreign managers but they were just slightly less shit than Roy Hodgson" then I remembered, "I'm not English". They had Goren Eriksson and Capello and they were dire. Of course there's a racist element in the F.A decision making process but it's not the majority opinion all of the time.

Mind you, we've had Berti Vogts and he wasn't much better either.

Speak for yourself. They're exactly as difficult as *I* would have expected them to be.

The most surprising thing to me, still, is how piss-poor England played. Even though I picked England to go through this round, I was still expecting a close, hard-fought battle where anything could happen and England could still stand to lose.

But England didn't even bother to even try and compete. They played like a bottom-rung EPL side fighting a relegation battle with the absolute worst passing (long-ball) game ever. That's what was completely unexpected.

Where the heck is racism supposed to be? Now, sure, there may be racist folks inside that FA, but until one of them comes out with an unfortunate comment, it's best to not assume malice, but rather incompetence (and boy, is there a lot of incompetence going on at the English FA, regardless of the nationality of the manager).

When it comes to the selection of a national manager, ideally you want a manager from the same nation as the players, because:

A) Communication becomes easier. No need for translators, and it creates a greater sense of affinity and adaptability to adverse situations (culturally speaking);

B) Related to the native language, sharing a nationality with the players ensures (or helps to ensure, in most cases, provided the players and the manager are not dicks or locker room disruptors) a sense of both group cohesion and unity (national unity).

This becomes especially important in countries with a fairly strong racial diversity in the team (e.g. Portugal, France). Notice that there's been only one manager who was not from a winning nation (e.g. Greece 2004, led by Otto Rehhagel, a German). There are once-in-a-lifetime occasions where a manager ends up sharing a language, but not a nationality (e.g. Otto Glória, Brazilian manager who led Portugal to their amazing debut in the World Cup of 1966 - our third place there is still the best we have ever reached in a World Cup), btw.

C) But, more importantly, you need managers and FA's who know both the national league as well as all the players who are playing around the world (or, in this case, Europe, since only a few national teams have a player or two that play outside Europe), you need managers who know that their FA is taking care of youth development (England seems to be lacking in this last part, in spite of all their facilities and money available), and who can inculcate a distinct style of play (e.g. Italy - who by the way, never had and never needed a foreign manager and generally always had very competent and very tactical managers - look at how many titles they have and how well they've performed in most tournaments).

Racism does not enter the equation when it comes to these matters. The English FA did not inculcate a distinct style of play in these past 16 years, they don't seem to be focusing on their youth development, and the managers seem to tend to not inculcate a style of play as well, and tend to merely choose the best players from the Premier League, instead of choosing a coherent/cohesive team. The Russian FA seems to be going through a similar problem (but with added corruption, iirc), which means no foreign or national manager can singlehandedly turn things around.

edited 28th Jun '16 8:19:39 AM by Quag15

I honestly didn't know much about it. It just seemed from watching the Euro and WC that many national teams use foreign managers so the English requirement seemed odd to me at first glance.

edited 28th Jun '16 9:11:10 AM by nightwyrm_zero

Foreign managers tend to be the exception in Europe's national football teams. It has been so since the beginning of the sport (in Africa, on the other end, you tend to see some national teams being led by European managers, because the FA's there don't have many or even a few (top) quality managers/head coaches - see, for example the list of Cameroon's managers throughout time - there are quite a few French managers because there's no language barrier, btw).

edited 28th Jun '16 9:54:24 AM by Quag15

Just because there is incompetence, and by crikey I probably know better than you how much of THAT is in the England Football Association, does not mean that there isn't malice as well. Capello and Erikson took pelters from inside the FA establishment all the way through their tenure as England managers. Just go look back on what happened to both men and how many "insiders" gave poisonous briefings all the way through their respective scandals. And it isn't just racism, it's classism. The best manager in British football of his generation (apart from Alex Ferguson and Jock Stein) was continually knocked back from the job because his face, accent and voice didn't fit. I am of course speaking of the sadly-not-immortal Brian Clough.

If even I, as a Scot, could see that giving him the role was an excellent idea and would have been great for the English game as a whole, then why else wouldn't he get it instead of the continual parade of non-entities that got it in his place?

Just look at his Wikipedia page and you'll see just why I and many others think that he was the greatest England manager who never got the job.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Clough

I'm sure you know more details than I know, but even I know that it's sad that Clough never managed to get that job (Clough has been one of my favourite managers of all time, alongside Mourinho or Marcello Lippi, to name a few, btw). As for classism, well, that is a problem of the (dis)United Kingdom's social attitudes and structures.

Besides, while the 'insiders' may have fucked Capello and Eriksson, it seems to me that the media and the general population are also not kind to managers who share the same nationality as them. I don't recall Roy Hodgson receiving genuine support, looking back in hindsight (even if it has been shown that he was a bit clueless throughout these Euros). So, the problem exists both inside and outside the FA circles.

The English media tend to hype the team as if they were heaven-sent, but then, at the first sign of trouble, people immediately start to jump ship and bash the team and the manager (the latter in particular) and engage into some spectacular 'we're shite!'-type attitudes.

Besides, there's so much club-ism going on (it's amazing how I saw on /r/soccer the immediate divisiveness between, say, Liverpool and Manchester United fans in regards to players like Sterling and Rooney, or how some of the older players in that team weren't fond of Sterling, right after yesterday's match). I also see the club-ism going on here in Portugal, but not to the point that it affects the national team's chemistry (it helps that most of the players in the current squad play outside Portugal).

edited 29th Jun '16 8:01:52 AM by Quag15

And here I figured it was Clough's elitist stature and uncompromising attitude on everything that would've been the issue.

Clough may have summarized all his disagreements with his players as, "We talk about it for 20 minutes and then we decide I was right," but how would it pan if he'd quarrel with the FA? Hell, how did it pan out for Clough when he quarreled with the board at Derby and Leeds? Clough could have just as well have won England some trophies, but he could have just as easily have created turmoil with the rest of the FA that wouldn't have had anything to do with his face.

edited 28th Jun '16 10:27:31 AM by SeanMurrayI

I see your Derby County and Leeds and I raise with Nottingham Forest, one League win, four League cups, two European Cups (in successive seasons, something no other club in England ever managed unless I'm very much mistaken), plus many other honours. A record of success that no other candidate for the job could match. Sure, there may have been friction, but not even giving him the chance to be manager for even one international qualifying campaign? That's stupidity of the highest order. Or worse. I kinda go with the worse.

I'm well aware of Mr. Clough's history at Nottingham Forest, and propping up the list of his accomplishments there is only a means of evading the elephant in the room: "Friction," as you put it, cost Clough his job on more than one occasion. The FA knew it. You know it. We all know it. And that's a serious problem—even when looking to hire somebody in any line of work today.

If a country's footballing governing body is in the business of appointing a new head manager for a national team, that's a decision that requires definitive confidence and long-term commitment on part of the footballing body and a willingness to get along with his superiors on part of the applicant. Clough could never have given a shit for what the FA might want, and consequentially, the FA couldn't have placed their trust in Clough.

There's not ever gonna be an option for a 30-Day Free Trial to give somebody "a chance to be manager" on the blind hope that someone just might turn out to be suitable to carry their squad through a cup tournament if the FA can't already feel confident in that person to begin with. Doing that could easily turn out to be more immensely stupid and do far more damage than simply turning down a high-risk applicant in favor of a safer option.

Not taking an uncertain gamble is always far safer than betting everything on black.

edited 28th Jun '16 2:07:44 PM by SeanMurrayI

The question you seem to be dodging is "Did England do any better WITHOUT Brian Clough than they would have done WITH Brian Clough?"

The answer is of course as far as I'm concerned not just "No." but "Hell NO!" judging by their results at tournaments/failing to even qualify for them. And most commentators and ex-England players I've heard talk about the situation tend to agree with me.

And even with "friction" at Derby County they still won the league with him as manager. (First Division) Something they've only done once since and that was the year after they sacked Clough and Taylor.

And note I said "qualifying campaign" - they're usually a four year thing for the World Cup at least. Not fifteen minutes.

Anyway, enough about Cloughie. We won't agree so there's no point in continuing on about him. Let's focus on Hodgson's performance at his second press conference yesterday. He looked, sadly, like a petulant, arrogant, tired old man.

http://tinyurl.com/hmwlpff

"Sitting alongside the Football Association's chief executive Martin Glenn, Hodgson was clearly irked with the task of addressing the media in his final day as England manager.

“I don't really know what I'm doing here. I thought my statement last night was sufficient,“ Hodgson, whose contract was set to expire after the tournament, told reporters."

I kind of see his point but still, he got the team into that situation - he was the manager in charge of one of England's most humiliatingly bad campaigns in recent history, so the buck stops with him.

How can anybody rightfully assert what England would have been like with Clough while was he never England Manager in the first place? The real answer is you don't know. Nobody does. Scenarios like this are purely speculative daydreaming, and answers like that are completely dependent on a heavy hand of Clough romanticism.

I'm as much an admirer of Clough's character and legend as anybody else, but taking a discussion topic like this seriously means setting all that aside and looking at more of the darker realities that Clough was human, flawed, and battling lots of personal demons. We're not even trying to acknowledge his struggles with alcohol that stretched back to the 70's. All of that and more would weigh into a decision by the FA to give Clough a job as much, or even more so, than a list of his accomplishments.

Not to mention that in light of Clough's faults, or perhaps, because of them, some people might argue that Peter Taylor was the real talent behind Clough's success in the first place.

edited 29th Jun '16 7:04:29 AM by SeanMurrayI

As I said, I'm done with this argument. You won't convince me I'm wrong and I won't convince you that I'm right.

Whatever you want to do, that's your call, but public comments aren't suddenly immune to rebuttal just because somebody says they don't want to discuss a matter anymore.

This discussion and others is not ever about me being "right" or anybody else being "wrong", nor do I care if I "convince" anybody of anything I'm saying. Just because I'm offering my own observations on a topic about football doesn't mean I'm trying to make it personal.

edited 29th Jun '16 6:59:58 AM by SeanMurrayI

The Brazil squad for the Olympics has been announced but most players still need to be released by their clubs.

Dnipro, who were Europa League finalists last season, have dissolved and disbanded.

The gigantic amount of stuff I have missed for having a low-memory laptop who prevents me from navigating decently on the web (and no way in hell I'm going to try editing TV Tropes with such a slow pace).

Chile winning Copa Centenario, Messi retiring, Iceland humiliating England, Spain losing to Italy, Del Bosque stepping down.... all of that while I'm still having some of my teeth very sensitive after that agonizing cleanup the day before my trip.

The only novelty I can contribute with at this point is that Unai Emery has been officially presented as PSG manager. I'll tell you this, and please mark my words: If he doesn't lead the team to UCL semifinals next year (2017), he won't survive the first season.