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Originally Posted by demonrail666
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Both teams were going at it very hard but neither of them seemed to cross any moral line. Nothing like we'd seen from Uruguay or (shudders) Honduras.
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Amen.. Those dirty fucking bastards.. In US we know those Hondurans too damned well.
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Originally Posted by demonrail666
Painful but still no more than a yellow for me.
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Yellow is ALL that I wanted. That was a dirty fucking play, he knew damned well that his foot was never going to touch that ball.. But Clint is a big boy, he can handle himself. I'm much more worried about Altidore, and this is when the Landon thing comes to bite a little harder in the ass.
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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
without jozy and with a busted-nose clint, the us attack was poor. johansson was a zero. thank fuck for corner kicks.
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Weren't you watching any of the past few years, corner kicks are USMNT bread and butter, its really an essential part of our game
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precisely, USA never even had any possession to lose. which made ghana's pressure relentless. too risky! they couldn't slow them down. that's just fucked. howard, we've forgotten to mention, was the best US player.
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I agree with this. Some people are saying Ghana was the better team because they had more shots and more possession time, but in this instance they were playing from behind.
As to not slowing them down, I agree and disagree, they may have had the ball, bu they didn't score for 82 minutes. That says something. Our defense isn't always predicated on controlling the ball so much as not letting them score, and we did a lot of typical US last minute saves by players NOT named Howard near the goal.. Its our last ditch effort, but its also part of our CONCACAF style, a lot of CONCACAF teams play this kind of risky defense. Its not just what has always hurt USMNT internationally, but CONCACAF teams in general which is why our league has a somewhat unwarranted bad reputation. What I have been hoping about Klinsmann is that he can help shake up our team to play a more Euro style BUT the downside is we still play in our league most of the time and I watched Jurgen struggle the first two years trying to readjust his own game plans to a different futbol reality. Jurgen tried to do some Euro things in the first year and got embarrassed by CONCACAF rivals who stuck to their original game plan and made us pay. The Gold Cup was a great example of US hybrid style potential, to blend a more Euro style approach to offense while still playing more traditional (for USMNT that is) defense. It worked..
So what we should expect from this world cup is a bit more of this game, and while it is risky I think it can work. After all, winning possession isn't winning the game, scoring the most goals and not letting the other team score is how you do that.
I loved this game, in many ways we came and punched Ghana in the mouth, and they played pretty hard by the way, a lot of dirty plays that I won't hold against them, we're tough enough to handle it, but it showed that they were under more pressure than they were not.