Team previews: The French!

Whoa! Where does the time go. Apologies for the gap - I had 2 wks of "nightfloat" - I work all night every night for 2 wks, with a 2 day break in between. Anyway, that's not excuse for forgetting the World Cup...

Today we'll continue with team previews from Group A. This week will be France, next week will be South Africa/Uruguay (remember, Group A is South Africa, Mexico, Uruguay, and France).

If you recall how much dislike I have for Mexico, it's basically opposite feelings for France. As some of you may remember, I went to a French-speaking mission and was there when the French won the World Cup in 1998 on their own soil. It was total bedlam, and I wasn't even in technically in France. Here are the highlights of their legendary final game (featuring goals by my personal favorite player ever, Zidane:



As with a lot of things about the French, it's almost more fun to reminisce than actually talk about the current team. Below is a well-known Nike commercial featuring soccer stars from the mid 90's. The final shot was taken by Eric Cantona, a Frenchman famous for scoring spectacular goals for his club team Man United, flipping his collar up when he played (shown in the commercial), and taking matters into his own hands when a fan was harassing him (it's him doing the flying kung-fu kick above. Anyway, here it is (a teeny bit intense; done for a foreign audience):


What kind of team are the French: Ever since they got to the European Championship semi-finals in 1996, the French have clearly had well above-average talent. Zidane (who was a once-in-a-generation talent) is now gone, but they still have plenty of hard-nosed defenders, creative midfielders, and brilliant strikers to beat anybody in the world. They do have some flair for attacking, but for some reason most of their big games end up 1-0 or something like that.

Who to watch: This is a little tricky, since I have several players on their team that I like. The first (and the one that my cousin Joe Harris likes a lot too) is their midfielder Franck Ribery. A self-described ugly guy (he was in a car accident when he was younger and half his face was reconstructed), he is super creative and has scored great goals (like the one below, taken from the 2006 World Cup when France beat Spain 3-1. Ribery is the one who scores the goal for France that ties it at 1-1. Zidane also scores at the end:


Another player to watch is their aging striker Thierry Henry - another one of my all-time favorites. Below are some of his goals:


I'm leaving out perhaps Frances best player: their striker Karim Benzema, who is probably better than either of the above players, but I couldn't find any clips of him that didn't feature bad techno music, so I'll spare you.

Are any of their games "must watch" events: You probably shouldn't miss France-Mexico, which could be an absolute classic. Also remember that the French are always fully capable of an upset, so try not to miss their later-round games either.

How will they do: Always hard to say. They should go through to the second round; at that point it could be anything from a 2nd round loss to the final match (though it's hard to see them winning it all.

That's it for this week. Next week: South Africa and Uruguay. See you then!

Now the fun starts!

First an apology for last week - I completely forgot to include the north/central America teams in my list. From our area, Mexico, Honduras, and the USA qualified. Sorry for the confusion.


I will now explain the last 2 things you need to know to understand how the World Cup works, then get on to the real fun stuff. Last week we talked about all of the countries (there are 32 of them). Obviously you can't have them all playing each other - that would take too long. What they do is separate them into 8 groups of 4 teams each. To make it fair, they choose the 8 best teams and put one of them in each group. Then they fill the groups with the rest of teams. As you can probably imagine, you always run the chance that the other teams in your group will be REALLY good, since they are selected randomly. You will hear the announcers talk about this as a team's "draw"(to use it in a sentence: "Oh crap, we have to play Brazil. That's a tough draw.").

Each of the 4 teams in these groups plays each other, and the best 2 teams in each group advance to the next round. How do they figure out who the 2 best teams are? In soccer you can either win, lose, or tie a game. In the world cup you get 3 points for a win, 1 point for a tie, and none (duh) for a loss. So, lets say that France won 1 game, tied 1, and lost 1, they would have 4 points. But wait, you say (since I know you're all smart) - couldn't two teams end up with the same number of points. They could, and so soccer has various tiebreakers. First, they use goal differential, meaning how many you scored minus how many you allowed your opponents to score (so if, over the 3 games, you scored 5 and allowed 2, your differential would be +3). After that they go to other stuff which is too boring to explain.

From there on out, it's a direct, single-elimination tournament - one loss and you're out. It goes from sixteen to 8 to 4 to 2 to 1.

Now, onto the real part of the blog - the whole reason I started it in the first place: talking about the teams, and who you should watch. I will be covering 1-2 teams a week, together with necessary videos. I'm going to be starting with Group A, and working my way through.

Group A is South Africa, Mexico, Uruguay, and France. Today we'll talk about our compadres to the south, Mexico.

The scoop on the team: I will say first and foremost that this is the most difficult team for me to write about. As a die-hard fan of US soccer, I dislike the Mexican team with a passion. That aside, they are usually a fun team to watch. Like most South American teams, they play with a flair, and have rabid fans. But old wounds are slow to heal, which is why the first video I'm posting is of the beat-down that we gave them during the knock-out rounds of the 2002 World Cup. As the game went along, and the Mexicans knew they were going to lose, they turned all of their energy towards attempting an on-field beat-down of US midfielder Cobi Jones while the game was going on (Rafa Marquez's flying kick/headbutt earned him a red card). Like I said, no love here.


Who to watch: Carlos Salcido is probably be their best player, though a little temperamental. Still, he's great defender, and has scored some spectacular goals. Below is one his better ones, which he scored for his club team:


Salcido might be better, but the one everybody remembers is Cuauhtemoc Blaco. Named for the last Aztec emperor, he has long been a fan favorite, and has seemed to get better with age. He is a masterful passer and a fiery competitor (though he can be rattled - in 2002 the USA's Pablo Mastroeni got under his skin so much in their World Cup match that it was all Blanco could do to keep from slapping him. Below are some of Blanco's best goals (just so you know, "America" is a Mexican soccer club that Blanco played for).


Are any of their games must-watch events: You probably shouldn't miss Mexico - France if you can help it. Both teams are very talented, and should be fun to watch playing each other.

How they will do: The Mexicans are always capable of a full-fledged stink-bomb, but they usually do pretty well in the opening round. After that, they always seem to find ways to flame out (to Argentina at the last world cup, and to us at the one before that). They have more and more players playing professionally at the top leagues in Europe, so everybody keeps thinking they're going to turn the corner. This may be their year. They should do enough to get out of their group to the knockout round.

That's all for Mexico. Let me know if there's more that you want to know about teams than what I've put. Until next time....

Come to the party!

This week the reading is a little more dry, but important. I promise it will be spiced up with a couple of videos, though, and next week's will be (I think) really good, so stay tuned.

In America, whenever we say that teams are in the "finals", we usually mean that it is the last two teams in a tournament. For the World Cup, though, you will hear people talking about all of the teams as being in the "finals". The reason? The World Cup has already been going on for almost 2 years, and this summer really is the final part of the huge event. Here's how it works:

FIFA, the international governing body of soccer has a little over 200 members. Not all of these are independent countries - Great Britain, for example, has 4 teams: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland - but most of them are. Every one of these members had a chance to get to the World Cup finals in South Africa, and they all played each other over the course of about a year and a half to see who goes.

In order to make this fair, FIFA had divided the world up into regions. The regions are South America, North/Central America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania (quick - try to name the countries of "Oceania"). Then they decide how many spots in the finals each region gets, based on how good the soccer teams from that region are. For example, the teams from Europe are usually outstanding, and there are a lot of them, so they get 13 spots in the finals. Africa - also with lots of countries - gets 6. South America, who produces champions all the time but does not have as many countries competing for spots gets 4 spots plus a chance at a fifth.

Different regions use different formats for qualifying, which would be waaay too boring to describe, but basically what this involves is playing a home game and an away game against each team in your region. Not surprisingly, teams use every chance they can get to gain an advantage. For example, when we play Mexico, they make us play them in the high-altitude, very polluted, massive Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. We then turn around and make the Mexicans come play us in Columbus, Ohio in February, where it's about -20 degrees, and the Mexicans are mostly concerned about not freezing to death. In South America, the country of Bolivia (which isn't very good) makes everybody come play them in their capital of La Paz, which is at 12,000 feet elevation in the Andes mountains, and where players try not to pass out. You can see how this would be a lot of fun. Below is some footage of Josh Wolff scoring for the USA against Mexico during a 2001 qualifying game which the Mexicans still call "La Guerra Fria" (The Cold War).



What all of this means is that for many countries, it's a GIGANTIC deal just to get to the finals. Take Honduras, for example: It's a small, central American country going through a low-grade civil war, and hadn't been to the World Cup finals since 1982. They had gone through their 1.5 years of qualifying, only to come up a little short (or so they thought). In order to qualify for the finals, they needed to win their last game (which they did), and then hope the USA scored a goal to tie Costa Rica in a game that was going on at the same time, which would move Honduras past the Costa Ricans in the standings (how one team tying another helps a third team will be explained in a future post). Below is a video of the USA scoring the last-second goal, and you can hear the Honduras radio announcers while they watch it.



What happened afterward? The president of Honduras declared a national holiday. Like I said, it's a huge deal.

So who is coming to the party? Below are the squads. Next week we'll start to do the actual fun part of this blog, which is to go through each team and talk about which great players to watch.

The Host:
South Africa

Europe:
Denmark
England
France
Germany
Greece
Italy
Netherlands
Portugal
Serbia
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Switzerland

South America
Argentina
Brazil
Uruguay
Paraguay
Chile

Africa:
Ghana
Ivory Coast
Cameroon
Nigeria
Algeria

Asia:
Japan
South Korea
North Korea
Australia (bet you didn't know Australia was in Asia...it's a long story)

Oceania:
New Zealand