So we came to the last two games at this year’s World Cup. As you may know, France and Croatia will clash for the title of World Champions, and Belgium will play against England for the third place. It’s been an interesting competition, with some very surprising results, as well as a lot of memorable moments. As far as I’ve seen on the television, and I might add that I’ve watched all of the live coverages of the games at least a little bit, everything was going great when it comes to the organisation of the event and everything surrounding it.
As I have already written in a previous post, I have a lot of great memories regarding football World Cups. This time around, although it was still fun to watch all the games, I have no special memories regarding the Cup, at least for now, who knows what might happen on final night. 😀 I wasn’t at home while the games were being played and broadcasted, I still managed to see them live, even while being at work.
Let’s move on now to some more or less surprising events and results. In my opinion, there have been a handfull of surprises in the group stage, as well as in the knockout stages. Here, I should point out that the games I’ll talk about later, are my own personal choices, so whether you agree with me or not, feel free to let me know what you think in the comments. 🙂
First let me talk about the very first game of the tournament, between the hosting country, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. Russia won 5:0, which was a bit of a shock to me. Okay, I knew they were the hosts and that they might play better in front of a huge crowd in Moscow, but never could have expected that kind of a result. Next up, I would mention Argentina’s draw with Iceland, which, again, I didn’t think it would turn out the way it did. Argentinians were the runner-ups in Brazil four years ago, so I was expecting something similar this year. And in the end, I really can’t forget the Germans. They were, and at this moment still are, the reigning champions, but as the previous competitions have shown, teams defending the title never even made it out of the group phase, let alone have a good chance of defending the title. Germany lost against Mexico and South Korea, which was even more surprising, but in my opinion they really didn’t deserve to go through, even though they had some chances going into the final gameday of the group stage. There were other favourite teams that didn’t play as it was expected of them, but it would be waaay too long if I wrote all of that. 😀
As in any tournament where you have sad moments for one team, there are always happy moments for others. For example South Korea winning against Germany, like I already mentioned. Even though the Koreans were also eliminated, they really celebrated, and in my opinion thoroughly deserved, that win and I was really happy to see them celebrate it the way they did.
Russia also had a good run of games in the tournament, despite losing their last group stage game against Uruguay, but then they eliminated 2010 champions, Spain, before causing Croatia a lot of problems in the quarterfinal, which Croatia won after penalty shootout in the end.
And at this point, I can’t get past Croatia’s victory over Argentina. Even though Croatia made it all the way to the final, that game is the only one (so far), that I agreed with everyone who said Croatians deserved the win. I know I might get some weird looks at home because of what I’m going to say next, but I really believe that they didn’t deserve to get all the way to the final. They do have a great team, that’s undeniable, but the way they played in these knockout stages, in my eyes, don’t deserve to be in the final. But as we say, the ball is round and you never know what will happen, and they are in the final now, so we will see what kind of a game we will have on Sunday.
I tried to sum up some of the games that stayed in my memory, as I’ve said, feel free to comment what you think about it and maybe point out your own best ones. 🙂 Let’s hope for these last two games to be great, no matter who wins at the end!
Blogging with Jure 