Re: FIFA World Cup 2010 Thread
 

If anyone remembers in 2006 France's teams had one of the highest average ages (IIRC), so their experience carried them to the finals, but this time around they had a bunch of fresh blood and little collective experience.

Italy has a history of doing poorly/just scraping by in the round-robin play and then kicking butt in the knock-out play. If they had played all three games the way they played in the last 20 minutes of their game against Slovakia they probably would have won their group. You could see their desperation as they realized that they wouldn't make it into the second stage and they got into overdrive.

Re: FIFA World Cup 2010 Thread
 

I'm not following the World Cup, but I heard about the game where a team played with some "coopertition" in order to force an overtime, since they needed 2 goals to advance and an OT goal apparently counted double. I thought that was really, really awesome and interesting.

Re: FIFA World Cup 2010 Thread
 

^^ Don't know which match you're talking about. There is no overtime (unless you mean stoppage/injury time) in the group stage matches. There is however, the Golden Goal (pretty irrelevant for the World Cup, though). In the event of a draw and for any organizations that use the Golden Goal format, the first team that scores a goal wins the match. However, FIFA decides all draws at the end of regulation with penalty kicks, not the Golden Goal.

In addition, "coopertition" in this manner is generally very discouraged and actually against the rules. It's not fair to help another team out like this because you ruin another team's chances of advancing.

Re: FIFA World Cup 2010 Thread
 

And now I have no idea where I read that. Maybe it was a dream...

Re: FIFA World Cup 2010 Thread
 

This one? http://www.snopes.com/sports/soccer/barbados.asp

Or are you thinking of the Germany/Austria game, maybe in 1974, that caused FIFA to go to playing the last group games at the same time now? Back then, they knew the result of the other game int the group. A 1-0 result would send both Germany and Austria to the knockout stage. Once a goal was scored, the teams only went throught the motions for the rest of the game.