Re: The Football Chat (cont) : Sat May 19, 2012 10:39 pm  

Northampton_Saint wrote:

snip

Disagree, imo, apart from the last ten minutes, the penalty shootout was the most exciting part of the game, it's tense (for fans and players), it's about holding your nerve.

It's far too late to back this up with facts, and I look forward to being proved wrong, but surely there's no correlation between the 'better' team losing more often than not on penalties... As a Man United fan, I went to the FA cup final against Arsenal where we did them over for 120 mins, then lost, but on the other hand in Moscow in 2008, we were the better team (imo) and won...
It's the same as losing a game you dominate, surely you only remember the ones you lost, and couldn't really care less when you win...

Back on topic, well done Chelsea. Nice to have another English team at the top of Europe again...

Re: The Football Chat (cont) : Sat May 19, 2012 10:46 pm  

Chelsea deserve their success.

On the night they were lucky, but they've plugged away doggedly over the past 8 years and been damned unlucky in that time on many occasions. Abramovich looked triumphant, you could tell he's been awaiting this moment a long time.

As for bayern, geez that sucks. It's not like the CC in rugby league where you can make the final pretty easily, this competition is really bloody hard to win and when you make the final you need to take the chance of glory. Losing 2 finals in 3 years sucks, theres no positive to that.

Re: The Football Chat (cont) : Sat May 19, 2012 10:47 pm  

Well done Chelsea, pleased for the Drog, PL legend when he's not being a tart

amazing goal elsewhere

google

'Radamel Falcao scores one of the all time great goals v America de Cali'

Re: The Football Chat (cont) : Sat May 19, 2012 10:48 pm  

Wilbred T Pricklepop wrote:

Chelsea deserve their success.

On the night they were lucky, but they've plugged away doggedly over the past 8 years and been damned unlucky in that time on many occasions. Abramovich looked triumphant, you could tell he's been awaiting this moment a long time.

As for bayern, geez that sucks. It's not like the CC in rugby league where you can make the final pretty easily, this competition is really bloody hard to win and when you make the final you need to take the chance of glory. Losing 2 finals in 3 years sucks, theres no positive to that.

They've already won it four times. To take it for a 5th time when we've never won it would have just been greedy.

Re: The Football Chat (cont) : Sat May 19, 2012 10:53 pm  

flipper wrote:

'Radamel Falcao scores one of the all time great goals v America de Cali'

Brilliant goal but what kind of marking is that? If there was a defender stood anywhere close then he wouldn't have even been allowed to attempt that because it'd be dangerous play.

Re: The Football Chat (cont) : Sat May 19, 2012 10:56 pm  

Lord God Jose Mourinho wrote:

They've already won it four times. To take it for a 5th time when we've never won it would have just been greedy.

All the great teams who have won it plenty of times all had an era where they had exceptional teams and won it multiple times in a short period to rack up their tally.

You have madrid, 5 times on the trot when the competition first came into inception, then munich 3 times on the trot in the 70's, then liverpool in the late 70's early 80's, milan in the late 80's and early 90's.

Otherwise teams just don't win it often, not unless they are exceptional. You'll forgive me for saying so, but this chelsea team is not exceptional and neither is the bayern team, neither will win the competition in the near future.

Re: The Football Chat (cont) : Sat May 19, 2012 10:58 pm  

I am gutted for Robben though. I obviously retain a little bit of admiration for Mourinho, and I hold Robben in nearly high as regard. An awesome player, the best talent I've ever seen in a Chelsea shirt.

Re: The Football Chat (cont) : Sat May 19, 2012 11:05 pm  

Wilbred T Pricklepop wrote:

You'll forgive me for saying so, but this chelsea team is not exceptional...

I think the team and the circumstances are the worst they've been since Roman bought the club. I don't think the team is exceptional, but the fact that we won the thing, and the manner we did it, is exceptional IMO.

Doing it with a caretaker manager, with players who are pretty much over the hill, being knocked around on the field, getting your players sent off, suspended and handing out ridiculously soft pens.

In many ways it is more exceptional that we won it than the Barca sides did. They were the best side in Europe - winning the CL is where the best sides should be. But we shouldn't have won it this year, the scousers shouldn't have won it, Wimbledon shouldn't have won the FA Cup.

Re: The Football Chat (cont) : Sat May 19, 2012 11:17 pm  

Lord God Jose Mourinho wrote:

I am gutted for Robben though. I obviously retain a little bit of admiration for Mourinho, and I hold Robben in nearly high as regard. An awesome player, the best talent I've ever seen in a Chelsea shirt.

Robben is a special talent, his goal that won it for them at Old Trafford was technically superb, bit of a whining sh/t but thats not uncommon in the game these days

Re: The Football Chat (cont) : Sat May 19, 2012 11:48 pm  

Lord God Jose Mourinho wrote:

How does it favour the worst performing team?

In pure psychological terms how could it not? Which of these teams is going to enter a shootout in a more positive frame of mind do you think: The one that's dominated the game and should have won comfortably but had the fates conspire against them to rob them of what should already have been their deserved win, or the team that's been outclassed and had to hang on desperately for dear life for 2 hours fearing the inevitable worst but that has somehow escaped? How could that fail to be of benefit to the worse team, I mean seriously - how? Shootouts may or may not favour the lesser team by a significant margin statistically (and I don't know how on earth anyone could fairly correlate the statistics to do so) but at the very, very least they do no favours at all to the better performing team over the 120 minutes and that even in and of itself is just plain not right nor fair. It's like stopping an F1 race 100 yards from the finishing line and then making all the cars finish that last 100 yards starting lined up side-by-side as a drag race. It has nothing to do with the nature of the sport at all, is utterly unfair and makes a mockery of the entire rest of the event leading up to that point.

As much as anything else though, shootouts are destroying football as an entertainment at the highest level. How many big finals these days are any kind of a spectacle at all? The fact is that most teams, terrified of the career-ending consequences of adventure counting against them, are content to sit back and take no risks for 120 minutes, safe in the knowledge that they have a 50/50 chance of winning the trophy at the end of it whatever, with the comforting and chairman-defusing excuse that "we only lost on penalties so were unlucky" if they don't. I'm sick and tired of being bored rigid by big finals full of 11 men behind the ball tedium now frankly. Something should be done to force both teams to at least have to try and win these big games, and lord knows penalties aren't it....

kearney1989 wrote:

Disagree, imo, apart from the last ten minutes, the penalty shootout was the most exciting part of the game, it's tense (for fans and players), it's about holding your nerve.

But it has nothing to do with the game or the sport and is a completely artificial adjunct to it.... If you want to artificially have tension and excitement over and above all then why not just scrap the tedious 2 hours altogether and make the teams play "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" or "The Cube" instead? At a football match I want to watch 2 teams playing a game of football and for the result to be played out and won in footballing terms, preferably in as entertaining and enterprising a manner as possible. If I want to see manufactured "tension" and "excitement" then I'll go watch a movie instead.