World Cup 2014

[Admin 14,370]

The World Cup kicks off tomorrow night with Brazil vs Croatia, and like many I'm looking forward to a month packed with football. Whilst I'll be supporting England, I don't have particularly high hopes for them (as usual). In fact I reckon Brazil are in with the best shot of with winning, but what about you?

[steve25805 121,635]

Oh I don't have high hopes for England either. They have already lost their first game. They are just not a furst rank team in terms of the quality of the football they seem to come up with. I think their chances of even getting beyond the group stages are less than 50:50 at this point.

Brazil are the obvious most likely winners, what with home advantage too. Too early to say who the other most likely contenders might be yet.

[Admin 14,370]

Looks like we were right to doubt them, they only managed a single point from the 3 games and are now out. It was a tough group to be fair, but you have to feel for the fans who've paid so much to travel out there to watch that. I imagine Brazil is a pretty amazing place to be right now, though.

I haven't seen much of the world cup these past few days, but have been checking the results. Spain's group stage departure was pretty surprising. Oh, and the latest talking point is probably Luis Suarez... biting a player for the third time, and understandably getting banned from all football for 4 months. What do you guys make of this?

[steve25805 121,635]

Oh yes, their performance was mediocre, and mediocre doesn't cut it in a World Cup tournament. But I have long abandoned the hope I had in younger days. Where England is concerned, bitter disappointment is the only thing I have ever found down that road. And the pure fact is that we are not nurturing enough home-grown talent. 25 years ago there were nearly 200 English players in the premiership. Now there are only 77. We are in effect buying the best from elsewhere to provide great club football, and sacrificing our national performance to do it. And this is a terrible pity since a major tournament win - European Championship if not World Cup - would do more than anything else to increase the popularity of the sport and get more kids playing it. I'd like to phase in rules in English League football which mandate that at least six of any team on the pitch at any time should be English, forcing the nurturing of more indiginous talent.

As for Suarez, his punishment is fair enough in my book. If any of us mere mortals did that in fromt of countless witnesses, in no time at all we'd be having our collars felt by the cops, and find ourselves in a courtroom being done for violent assualt and Actual Bodily Harm at the very least. A repeat offence would probably result in jail time.