Anyone following the World Cup?

Croatia was the better team, but then it’s football and everything can happen. Even if you dominate ball posession by 64 vs 36%, you can still have have a referee simply whistling for the other side…

Croatia won the football-game but the referee helped France to score the goals…

Never read something more dishonest that this.

Next time we will add soccer to religion and politics in the list of forbidden subjects :slight_smile:

I think the problem mainly comes from “people who know”.
Politicians often talk like they know everything, a lot of religious people too (“god” is a convenient explanation for all things that happen in this universe). Similarly, soccer fans always have a strong opinion about the games they watched (even if they never played soccer by themselves). Most of the time, they all just say bullshit :blush: .
We have to admit we know almost nothing. There is so more to discover and learn.
Couldn’t we stop having an opinion on everything, particularly when we are not experts in the field we are talking about ? Yesterday’s match was quite fun and entertaining, that’s it, nothing more. We don’t care who are the champions and who are not. No need to debate for hours (I really don’t care France is the World Champion, believe me this won’t change my life at all, I’ve just slept less last night because of those fucking noisy neighbors).

If I hear Deschamps or Zidane talking about soccer, then they are probably right. If it’s me of Mr Random, talking about soccer, we should just shut up our mouths.

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Thank you for doubting my honesty - maybe you also doubt the statistics of ball posession and so on. Next to that the first goal was scored after a free kick - for no reason! There shouldn’t have been a free kick. That French player fell without beeing touched. There is a video-referee available for things like that and it should have resulted in a yellow card against France, but it led to a free kick and a goal benefitting France.

Now the penalty after the croatian hand-play … was there a deliberate movement to wards the ball? Would this have resulted in a penalty in the German, UK or Spanish league? The answer is a clear and 100% “No”. But the video refereee (sleeping on work before, mentioned here above) now comes in play and the main referee sees a deliberate movement and awards a penalty towards France.

Being German, I do not necessarily care who won the tournament. My team played horribly and left the green long ago. I even live in France and watched the game with Frenchmen, and they all agreed, that “those referee-decisions were lucky”. But you need luck from time to time and France had their share yesterday.

The better team lost, but - hey - it’s football!

Sorry to say this, but you look like the perfect example of what I describe in my post before.
Go complaining on Twitter instead :slight_smile:

Congrats to :fr: :sparkler: :soccer: !

Yesterday 20 min past 8 pm in Antibes:

Now, now, we shouldn’t say bad things about politics and faith just because they are easy targets. There are still good people fighting the good fight, despite the bad actors. Same with soccer / football. As with all things, usually the apparent strong pick on the ones who are perceived weak.

It is entirely possible that the referee calls were invalid but they were kept for maximum effect, whether it be to infuriate the fans or simply to maintain the flow or energy of the match. There is also match fixing and gambling; that is another Pandora’s box that I hope folks here won’t open.

I for one don’t care about stats, nor the professional side of sports. I tend to get my enjoyment out of those who play hard with a smile on their face and ignore the scoffers. :slight_smile:

1st goal’s foul - he goes down too easy, not a foul. But it definitely a hand ball.

I fully agree - the ball definately touched the hand (or vice versa) - no question about that. But then there is the rule saying that you can’t punish a player for having a hand or an arm attached to his body. It is a foulplay if the hand deliberately touches the ball or gets stretched out towards the incoming ball. It is no foul, if the ball is simply played to where the bodyparts happen to be in space at that particular moment in time.

I don’t think that this would have resulted in a penalty in the top leagues of the World. And after that horrible first missjudgement, the referee should have thought twice about awarding another free goal to France, but he didn’t. He whistled absolutely in France’s favor.

On the other hand: six goals in 90 minutes - what a show! A real change from the last final with just one goal in 120 minutes. Imagine the refreree would have been neutral, the result would still have lead to 2-1 lead and the French goalkeeper would most likely have been less nonchalant about his ball posession in presence of a Croatian forward.

I can live with the outcome, but it was an ugly win of the inferior team. Just look who dominated the ball.

Ball possession is just a statistic, it doesn’t say anything about who should win or lose…

This is just my opinion, as someone who has been rooting for Croatia since I saw them in their first group match:

I agree that the player falls too easily, but there was a touch.

I think it was a penalty because the defender’s arm was moving (not stretching) towards the ball. It was probably not deliberate (that’s impossible to tell), but the hand wasn’t static after the header.

I agree that Croatia was unlucky because those two calls could easily have gone either way, but more important than that, Croatia had plenty of opportunities to score and missed them. I actually think France proved to be the better team, technically.

Overall I think it was a pretty exciting match, and that was what I was really looking for.

Right, just like completed passes – otherwise, Spain would be superchampion of the world!

I’m not 100% sure about if it was foul or not, but it seemed that that Perisitch gave a deliberate slap in the ball, while trying to keep the arm attached to the body. In this case, it would be a foul, isn’t it?

Am I seeing things?

He jumped, his arm was not tight to his body, and that was a hand ball.

well I think so, to be honest. but it doesn’t matter, Croatia was unlucky but France is really good, overall they deserved it I think

Hand ball is one of the hardest calls to make. I have been guilty of them even when I wasn’t near the ball! It is about perspective and opinion, just as it is for photography. :stuck_out_tongue: However, when a call is made, then everything that I said in my previous post applies.

out of question!

I - personally so it’s my opinion and not the (any) “truth” - cannot remember in recent memory as partial and unjust match due to (mostly) fucked up arbitrage, IMO shameful anyday, double dose being a world cup’s final. In a previous post I already expressed how I thought VAR was a bad idea, I can live with human error but the politics, delays, changes and BS associated with yet another set of “objective” eyes… Why if it’s so objective didn’t the piece of snail trail of an individual behind the god damn monitor advise main referee that griezman was jumping to the pool?!.. and that hand ja jaajaja ja don’t make me laugh. In my neighborhood we’ve got a very good word for that; it’s called bullshit. But yeah, let’s be the bigger man and pretend that 2 goals against ( among other things) is not so important. Best thing and a lesson for those who have eyes for seeing was croatian PM being a true and wet matter giving impartial hugs to everyone, e v e r y o n e, even the {insert decomposing little animals here, je je} referees. Peace out

I think you have to separate the two issues here. First, France has a really good team, with a lot of talented players. If you consider the whole tournament, I think nobody can say that they did not deserve to win. That said, Croatia could win just as well. They played really well in the finals (though not so much in some of the previous rounds), and were really unlucky to find a referee that made two clearly wrong (IMHO) calls against them…