Well, after a performance like that it would be easy to blame the coach. It would be easy to blame the referee. It would be easy to blame the ball. It would even be easy to blame the vuvuzela trumpets.
But I blame the media.
Not for the loss, but for the over-ambitious expectations they foisted upon the team. This is not cricket. This is not swimming. It is not rugby union, or even rugby league. It is more like the winter olympics, where we can only triumph if our more favoured opponents fall.
But for the benefit of the bandwagon, here is some perspective...
We have played in three World Cups. Germany have won three World Cups.
We have scored 5 goals in those three tournaments. Miroslav Klose scored that many alone in the last World Cup. He also scored five in the previous tournament without even using his feet!
We were never going to win. It was simply an exercise in damage limitation. Verbeek was correct not to use Kewell. Perhaps Kennedy should have been tried, but I liked the Garcia experiment, and once Cahill got that card then Pim needed to save the forwards for the Ghana game. In my mind the only doubtful call was the decision to play the offside trap. Extremely doubtful. In fact, just plain stupid.
But if you saw any of the coverage in the mainstream media tonight you'd have thought we were favourites for the tournament before this embarassment. The clueless coverage today has done nothing but erode the support and goodwill for the players and staff at exactly the time they need it most.
Quite simply the two games that mattered most were against Ghana and Serbia. Those two games are still to come.
Nothing has changed.
Except we don't have Cahill for the next game.
I blame the referee.
3 comments:
The meeja were always going to over-analyse the result good, bad or ugly. Wait and see how they react if we beat Ghana and Serbia (and qualify for 2nd round) - we'll be certainties for the world cup! You are right. It was about damage limitation - but we failed to limit the damage. We rightly took a defensive approach into the game but looked tentative, slow and couldnt the basics right. We failed to play up to expectations, however low they might have been.
2/1 odds that David Basheer will mention the Jabulani ball more than 10 times during our game against Ghana.
And who the fuck thought it was a good idea to let Muscat into the commentary box? 3/1 he won't string together three sentences that are grammatically correct at any point during the tournament.
Totally agree. Last world cup we played Brazil last and were already through. This time round we play the big one first so the doomsday media is always going to jump on that. Who is that Irish Commentator? I sort of recognise him him but can't put a name to him? Either way he is a twat! He was basically saying at halftime of the Germany match that we were out of the world cup. We maybe but that was a bit premature. Twat, Twat, Twat!
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