1 gigantic keeper boner + 3 goals (all France’s) that an awake keeper would have stopped. The whole Croatian team played their absolute best and then Subasic the goalie was dogshit.

Compared to literally any other World Cup semifinal from the past few decades except Netherlands-Uruguay in 2010 and the Brazil-Germany incident in 2014, it was wide open and full of ambition. It’s misleading that it was 1-0 and the only goal was from a set-piece; it seemed like there should have been a lot more to…

This seemed like a Billy Haisley article with Patrick Redford’s name on the byline. France doesn’t play “ultra-conservative,” Giroud’s not as crap as he’s made to sound, and ffs, no one in the world would ever describe Blaise Matuidi as “leaden.” He’s fast as shit, tall and wiry, and a brilliant all-around box-to-box…

Beat me to it. I would give anything to watch two superstar teams do this on the world stage.

[never mind ... it’s not even worth it]

There is no passive voice in any of those statements.

Right you are. Shows what I get for not having reffed in two years.

I don’t see where in the laws of the game you can be yellow-carded for failing to respect the distance on a penalty kick. “A player is cautioned if guilty of ... failing to respect the required distance when play is restarted with a corner kick, free kick or throw-in.”

Stuttering in the run-up to a penalty kick is explicitly allowed in the laws of the game. The only punishable move is faking the kick at the end of the run-up.

It’s almost as if he thought of a somewhat clever-sounding joke or observation, and was so desperate to shoehorn it into his article that it ended up going against all objective reality. I’m sure he’ll learn from this mista THIS IS HIS ENTIRE M.O. AS A WRITER.

Most players (and probably most refs) don’t know it, but in an instance like this the rulebook gives the keeper a huge out—a keeper can illegally handle a backpass in his own box, and even if he denies a clear goalscoring opportunity, he cannot under any circumstances be red-carded for it. The most he would give away…

His career record is currently 102-2 in best-of-five matches on clay (shout out to Robin Soderling and Djokovic, who make up the 2 in that figure).

Nice to see Lolo finally making it all the way around the bases after all these years.

Not that Pogba-Matic is comparable to Giggs-Scholes in style or background (i.e. Giggs/Scholes were with the club through the youth system and Pogba/Matic are expensive mid-career acquisitions), but I think most top managers in the world would look at a team with Pogba and Matic and think, “Now here’s a midfield…

True that Sevilla usually can’t defend for shit as you say, but it’s worth pointing out that Lukaku was on Lenglet Island (Île-de-Clement-Lenglet?) yesterday. I’d never heard of the guy before but he was glued to Lukaku and was first to the ball anytime it entered the Sevilla box.

That was one of the hallmarks of Ferguson’s reign at Manchester United: he wasn’t defined by one style, and seemed endlessly flexible at working with the tools he had. That’s how he ended up winning consistently for 25 years, instead of just a decade or so followed by more decades of everyone getting frustrated as the…

Don’t speak Tucson: there’s not Ayton of evidence against him. Although I’ve gotta say, Sean Miller if you do get yourself fired, you wrote UA into a pretty good windfall.

It crosses sports and national boundaries too. Britain is in the middle of a terrible scandal right now with a former youth soccer coach. It started with this mortifying disclosure from a now-retired pro (details like: after years of abuse, the coach started dating the player’s older sister and came over to the…

Ironic for a man whose livelihood was solely based off shooting.

Right, they weren’t better then than they are now, but this is definitely a step back.