what elbow ref?
Sunday, October 5th, 2008wow, i knew danny tiato was a thug, but i was gobsmacked when i saw this last weekend.
…and the melbourne player ended up with a yellow!
Archive for the ‘football’ Category
1 from 4
Thursday, September 25th, 2008have you heard about newcastle united’s fate recently? why don’t i fill you in!
apparently a couple of weeks ago kevin keegan was managing the side and everything was going pretty well, winning and drawing matches, positive rumours in the transfer market, m.owen was fit and even stayed on for another season…
then there were mumblings that funds weren’t being allocated to signings and it was out of the managers hands… after numerous meetings, one way or another, kev left the club… fans protest solidly and consistently… owner decides it was a mistake to disagree and part ways with kev, and now wants to sell the club off!
so now, the papers are full of takeover and new manager rumours, all the while the actual football players are losing at every opportunity… the premiership so far has gone like this:
1-0 win against bolton
0-3 loss against arsenal
1-2 loss against hull (!!)
1-3 loss against west ham
looks good eh…
after all my early season optimism, i think this year we’ll actually be in a relagation battle and some other clubs may even pick up some january bargains! not cool.
hopefully me writing this down will force the players to prove me wrong.
little niggles, finally!
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008i’m surprised there haven’t been cries for some football commentary seeing as the olyroos have been playing and the new EPL and A-League seasons are so close… i did watch both the australia vs serbia and the vs argentina matches…
we should’ve beaten serbia, even though we didn’t deserve to… the boys just switched off and were trying to defend for the last twenty instead of playing positively and at the very least keeping possession. against argentina was a different story, all of a sudden the olyroos looked a million times better, playing on the ground, in little triangles in mid-field, not nearly as many long balls…
something i’ve noticed, and i’ve said it before, not only is carney is an excellent player, but he has an element of cleverness that seems to elude most australian national players… he is mentally strong, and has this ability to niggle at the opposing players in a very european way… things like… he re-places the football for free kicks, just a little further forward from where the ref put it… he seemed to unsettle the serbs… just what the socceroos need if we ever come up against a less-than-spotless team in the round of 16 in a world cup for instance?
…but anyway, back to argentina, here we were, holding out the gold medal winners from 4 years ago and we didn’t even look to stressed about it, then they came out after the half time break and were determined to break us down… and did… but it was only one-nil in the end, and there were points in the first half when we could’ve actually stolen it…
i look forward to seeing the match against the ivory coast tonight, but haven’t looked at the table to see if we have a chance of qualifying… oh archie can’t play? big deal. he’s like the new mark viduka, always seems to be a target man, he even had a one-on-one with the argie keeper and shanked it completely… joel griffiths would have been a MUCH better pick… wake up arnie.
i forgot about motogp
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008you know you haven’t posted for a while, when you start considering writing about how hard it is to write… or you start revisiting the well worn road of discussing what’s really relevant…
but i know what’s relevant, things like; family, melbourne, football, music, tech, twitter, food… so i don’t need to go there do i… i just need to write more… easy.
now that that is out of the way, you know what’s been annoying me lately? a couple of people have been trying to finish my sentences for me, in an effort to prove they understand what i’m talking about… even when either of them ask me the question… it just proves they don’t, and most of the time it doubles the length of the conversation… **sigh**
ok, in other news, liam took his first real steps yesterday, i was absolutely gobsmacked… he’s becoming a real person! i’ve uploaded some news pics to prove it, hehehe…
hey! why don’t i make this an uber-post and try to cover ALL the categories above… hmm…
- melbourne is cold atm, it’s winter and getting out of bed in the morning is extremely difficult. i still love it though. in the evenings we have the heater on in our living room and often, because i’ve done the wii-fit thing, i stay in t-shirt and shorts until we go to bed, AND THEN, i wonder why i’m so cold…
- football? well, apparently duff scored a hat-trick in nufc’s win against hartlepool(?), i guess that’s good news (better than losing, duh) but you know, i honestly didn’t expect us to keep m.owen into next season, but seeing as liverpool just bought robbie keane, i think he might be safe! this also is the time of the year when i decide whether to join or start a tipping competition… hmm, i think i might skip the telegraph one this year, i get the impression guys do that one as a full-time job!
- music. hmm, i’ve discovered a new blog broken record that is really interesting, and my latest tumblr post is pretty depressing if you’re into it…
- the laptop i’ve been aiming for isn’t going to be released in australia! damn, against kim’s advice i think i’ll settle and if i feel like it later, i’ll buy a solid state disk for it separately.
- twitter is still there, and probably generally unheathy for my writing in this thing. my random thoughts that would used to have been full posts get reduced down to 140 characters or less… otherwise meh.
- and food. what can i say, i’m definitely eating less than i used to and am trying to shun the evil food i love… that said, we had fish and chips with emma and scott last night, and it was awesome but strangely unfulfilling… like the awesomeness didn’t make up for how kinda unwell i felt afterwards?
ok well, that seemed to work pretty well, amazing how much crap i can come out with.
or maybe not.
boring one nil
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008it feels like too long ago to post about the football now… but i’ll try anyway, even though i’ve just spent 45 not pressing the wordpress “write a post” button… here goes…
- i found the final fairly boring compared to other matches in the competition, but that could’ve been because i was so sick.
- russia vs spain was an excellent match and possibly the stand-out… it was 0-0 at the break, both teams played at 100% the whole time.
- maybe germany vs portugal was as good… but i only saw the extended highlights, damn you setanta.
- puyol cheats at every opportunity.
- apparently c.ronaldo was carrying an ankle injury the whole tournament?
- gotta feel for ballack and all his silver medals; 2002 world cup, 2002 & 2008 champions league, 2008 euro championships to name a few… plus, did you see him split his head open? damn.
- france scored one goal in the 3 group games, holland scored 9 but were knocked out by russia in the quarters, crazy.
ok, that’s all i remember that i wanted to say i think, aren’t you glad.
now to look to the coming premier league season… **sigh**
don’t bet on it
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008so in the euro2008 knockout match results so far, 3 from 3 of my picks have been incorrect, and if spain don’t beat italy, all 4 will be wrong.
so now one semi is germany vs turkey and the other is russia vs spain or italy (decided by tonights result)… so, because my pick is germany, you should go and put your money on turkey… and similarly, i pick spain for tonight, you should bet on italy, then, assuming italy win you money (count on it), i pick russia and germany for the final because i dislike them the least, and guess what; it’s a turkey vs italy final, (with italy winning of course, because i dislike them the most).
such is the power of my predictions.
oh and, yes i’ve been watching the daily highlights show on SBS, it has been brilliant. for sheehans benefit, croatia were desperately unlucky and can maybe even feel a little hard done by; what with scoring at the 119 minute mark, then wanting to make a sub to wind down the match… but the ref wouldn’t let the sub go ahead claiming there wasn’t enough time left, and then proceeded to add 3 minutes of injury time on, allowing turkey to score an equaliser… but yes, if after that, the croatian penalty takers had put their shots on target then this might be a different story… oh well, that’s probably what they get for having my support.
something else to note is the complete lack of diving by a ruud v.nilsterooy (sp?), what happened? he has seemed to have develop some sort of work ethic in his time at madrid… weird.
winding down
Thursday, June 12th, 2008so we’re off for some holidays on friday and as i’ve said before, we can’t wait! …heading up to qld for a bit to catch up with family and what-not… so… the blog might be a bit quiet because of limited inter-tubes access and disconnecting for a while, which probably isn’t a bad thing.
i might mms the occasional pic to the tumblr because i can.
in other news, work has been really good, quite challenging (and good). liam has been a little bit sick the last couple of days, and seeing as now he can stand himself up, he has been quite difficult to settle to sleep, kim even resorted to sleeping on a blow-up mattress with him, in a separate room, to make things a bit easier last night…
the euro2008 football highlights show on sbs has been great to watch, and hopefully while we’re up in townsville there will be cable TV, even better!
ok, gotta go find some summer clothes… laterz
heartbreak
Monday, June 9th, 2008just quickly,
watching alex frei limp half the length of the pitch crying his eyes out was horrible to watch. it actually was so moving, i even shed a tear for him at the time… this happened 44 minutes into the swi vs cze match, it was jokingly described to me by a friend as a “precision strike” on his knee… funny, but not cool.
even more so if you read what the poor guy has been through in the season just gone.
june in an even year!
Thursday, June 5th, 2008well, how slack have i been; just realised a lot of football has gone past and you haven’t been subjected to my insightful commentary.
so, just quickly, the victory lost 4-1 to juventus in a friendly during melbourne’s italy week… i only saw the highlights, adrian caseras’ goal was very good, juve scored a pen and a couple of headers… even from only seeing the highlights kemp looked way outclassed… how much longer will he be around? damn.
the socceroos have played and won some matches, a friendly against ghana and a world cup qualifier against iraq, both one-nil wins, very decent results against much better oppositions on the night, we need to get back to playing possession football, we were very lucky against ghana towards the end…
this weekend the euro2008 competition starts, even though i don’t have cable tv, i’m very much looking forward to the highlights and matches sbs has promised to show… i guess the favorites would be germany and italy, but i think portugal has a decent shot at winning it…
can you believe it has been four full years since c.ronaldo bawled his eyes out at the hands of greece! ahh memories… 
everyone wants to be tom morello
Sunday, May 25th, 2008seeing as the weather was pretty good yesterday we went to the gardens for a picnic with wendy, shane, sarah and jude… great to get some fresh air and sunshine, i even got told off for kicking a football around (no fun allowed apparently)…
the sarlins have headed off home via canberra now, it’s been cool to have wendy stay… and unbelievably it’s only about 5 weeks till we head north to queensland again!
4 percent just isn’t enough
Thursday, May 22nd, 2008so, the champions league final was good, and as expected… kind of… for once, i wasn’t frustrated by diving cheats the whole time, so that’s a start. a couple of years back we saw an all italian UCL final, i wonder which match the neutral supporter or new come’r would’ve preferred?
skippys header was a cracker, perfect placement, unstoppable…
lamps’ goal, umm, fortunate?
chelsea hit the goal frame twice more during regular time but it still played out for 120 minutes and had to be decided by penalties, and john terry in particular. he could’ve wrapped it up, and frankly, i thought he would. but no. pretty much a carbon copy of beckhams pen against portugal in portugal, his planted foot slipped and that was that.
it’s strange, with margins so close, neither team can really claim to have had it in the bag the whole time… and i definitely think chelsea’s road to the final was much more difficult than man u’s, but whatever… no one will remember how close the match was when a certain red a strip has an extra gold star sewn on it next season.
i’ll leave you with possibly the most telling statistic from the match…
man u
shots (on target): 13 (5)
chelsea
shots (on target): 25 (1)
one day nufc will win something, surely?
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008the fa cup came and went on saturday night, it was good to see neither team involved was one of the “big four”… i have to say though, cardiff looked the better team the whole match but just couldn’t put it away… kanu ended up bundling in a keeper error… it wasn’t really an error, but c’mon, a near post cross that he should’ve probably just caught instead of punching…
oh well, it was a lot more exciting than last year.
this thursday morning is gonna be great!
i read an interesting argument the other day… which is the best league in europe?
it’s a question that can’t really be answered. i know which leagues frustrate me most, don’t ask. that said, this seasons Man U hasn’t just ground out the season with one-nil wins, they won with style and swagger. brilliant to watch, always threatening to score and yes, i will be supporting chelsea on thursday, but with JT and drogs injured last week, can’t see the blues getting up…