Saturday, January 16, 2010

Old Enemies In Soccer World

There are many old enemies in the soccer world. As long as you are a soccer fan, you would find that thoes enemies brought us many wonderful and unforgetable matches. From now on, I will talk about several pair of enemies that are very strong teams.

1. Holland VS Portugal
2. Brazil VS Italy
3. France VS England
4. Spain VS France
5. Argentina VS Holland
6. England VS Portugal
7. Italy VS Germany
9. Portugal VS France
10. Spain VS France
11. England VS Germany
12. Brazil VS Argentina
13. Germany VS Brazil
14. Spain VS Portugal
15. Italy VS France
16 France VS Brazil

Today, I will talk about Holland and Portugal. Although those two teams have never won the world cup, they are traditional seeds in the world cup or the Europe cup. It is uncontroversial that the game between them would be eye-catching. However, their game means a real war because of history.

Let us look back what happened in their games in the recent years. It can be called a tragedy to Holland because they lose two important games in 2004 and 2006 respectively.

Van der vaart, Van Nistelrooy,Van Persie, Sneijder,Van Bommel,Robben…… Owning those stars, Holland should be capable of winning any other teams on the earth, however they did not.
In the 2004 Europe Cup, Portugal won his counterpart by 2 to 1. Portugal players took advantage of home field and curbed their opponent in 90 minutes. Similarly, Portugal beat Holland by 1:0 in the 2006 world cup. The game, I think, remains fresh in our fans' memory becuase it was filled with voilence. We knew the referee in that match was not crazy but he did give players in both teams 16 yellow cards and 4 red ones. Obviously it was rarely seen in soccer matches. Anyway, hatred is unavoidable in the soccer field between them if they meet in a very important elimination match.

C.Ronaldo is one of top stars, and he has a lot of tough teamates. But they must face three strong
rivals---Brazil, Ivory Coast, and North Korea--- in G group in the coming world cup. Whether they can stand out the group, they are supposed to show their traditional spirit passed down by Figo,Costa……

As to Holland, it have to find what is the problem on earth which constrains them so much whenever they are confronted with troubles before or just in important emilination games. Actually, Holland never lacks of talents. The key thing I believe they should deal with is how to integrate the whole team as one but eleven or more components without any connection. In other words, Holland young guys need unity and proper combination. Soccer is a game played by 11 guys, therefore you need to come out how those 11 players work out and effectiveness produced by the collective power which is better than just 11 parts.

At last, I suggest that Holland learn from the present Spain team, while Portugal should make use of practical tactics taught by the ex-coach Scolari because they are likely to face the hottest seeded team---Spain---if they scrape through the "death squad".

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