Guest alex Posted September 8, 2011 Share Posted September 8, 2011 BTW that goal against Nigeria showcased absolute pants defending. Woeful stuff. Not that Messi did anything wrong, but he didn't have to do anything particularly good to breeze by them. It's interesting to consider the differences in football in Spain and England. To say that Barcelona and real Madrid would sweep the floor with the likes of Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City is overstating it a lot. Surely they are a much better technical team, who play much more attractive football. Over a period of time there's little doubt that they would have a better record when playing those sides, but I don't think it would be that clear-cut. On top opf that I honestly believe that an upper mid-table English side would be on par or ahead of a similarly placed Spanish side, and then a lower-mid table English side would be ahead of the same in Spain. If that's not the case then English football has a lot to answer for as I'm sure the wages would be significantly higher in the English sides. I guess the only semi-answers we will get will come from champions league meetings. Spurs got spanked away and were a little unlucky to lose at home to real Madrid last year (Gomez.Howler). Messi took a crap Arsenal to school at home, but they only managed a draw at Arsenal. Thought they lost, actually. They absolutely battered Arsenal for about 30 minutes though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrew 4221 Posted September 8, 2011 Share Posted September 8, 2011 on the slightly lower sides from the PL and spain thing how come we hardly ever have sides win the europa league/UEFA cup? only one english team in my lifetime, largely been dominated by italy but moreso spain in the last ten years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest alex Posted September 8, 2011 Share Posted September 8, 2011 on the slightly lower sides from the PL and spain thing how come we hardly ever have sides win the europa league/UEFA cup? only one english team in my lifetime, largely been dominated by italy but moreso spain in the last ten years. Good point. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DEADMAN 0 Posted September 8, 2011 Share Posted September 8, 2011 well drogba is near the top on fifa so a possibility he might not of played well this season or last but hes still near the top Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Happy Face 29 Posted September 8, 2011 Share Posted September 8, 2011 well drogba is near the top on fifa so a possibility he might not of played well this season or last but hes still near the top Wasn't sure he was any good after watching him for 5 year. Thanks for the info. Hope it doesn't jinx him like Nii Lamptey. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DEADMAN 0 Posted September 8, 2011 Share Posted September 8, 2011 lol <_< Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Walliver 0 Posted September 9, 2011 Share Posted September 9, 2011 I had a version of Fifa (on the Gamecube to give a rough idea of time) where Darius Vassell was the best English striker, if not best striker, in the whole game. Messi Cronaldo Vassell? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Walliver 0 Posted September 12, 2011 Share Posted September 12, 2011 If you can put up with Andy Ansah (did he have a bet with someone about how many times he could high five Ronaldo?), then this is a pretty good watch. http://www.videoweed.es/file/4e69a7b3c79c2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dolly Potter MD 0 Posted September 12, 2011 Share Posted September 12, 2011 (edited) Quite a good player by all accounts. During the January window the club should utilise our Iranian friend/paid consultant's resources, by trying to unearth some type of obscure contract clause. A bid of a just few mill (a Billy Big Boots, take-it-or-leave-it 'final offer'... may may as well try & smear shit in the face of Barca's hierarchy as well), might be enough to turn the lad's head and force strike action. The lad couldn't possibly turn down a once in a lifetime career opportunity, to be a genuine pioneer within the sports retail business. A potential turning point for the lad. Continue to win silverware, or be Sports Direct's highest profile Argie ambassador, as Ashley hopes to his brand global. Who knows, if the lad shows a rapid rate of improvement we could further aid Liverpool's drive towards the top slots, and make a few more bob - while keeping it safely within the club. Edited September 12, 2011 by Year Zero Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tooj 17 Posted October 4, 2011 Share Posted October 4, 2011 http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7034370/ronaldo-vs-messi all, powerful, sneering Cristiano Ronaldo and short, slippery, cheerful Lionel Messi ought to form one of the great dichotomies in sports — think Magic/Bird, only in Romance languages. They're the two best soccer players in the world.1 They star on opposite sides of Real Madrid versus Barcelona, currently the game's most compelling rivalry. And they're temperamental opposites — Ronaldo a flamboyant, collar-popping he-diva who measures time in lingerie models, Messi a low-key, affable team player who seems to live for the game. Under normal circumstances, soccer writers would be calling this the Ronaldo/Messi era. Fans would view every development in the sport through the prism of their rivalry. We'd talk about them, rightly and endlessly, as the two divergent possibilities for soccer in the modern age. In many ways, this is a more obvious leap to make with Messi and Ronaldo than with some of the game's most storied pairs — say, Cruyff and Beckenbauer, who spent their best years playing in different countries,2 or Pele and Maradona, whose careers didn't overlap at all. Somehow, though, it hasn't really happened. Sure, people compare them all the time. And there's a moment before every Clasico when the commentator says something like, "And Ronaldo will be very eager to get one over on Leo Messi tonight," generally while Ronaldo trots around during warm-ups looking unaware of Messi's existence. But they don't feel like a dichotomy, exactly — more like two planets that occasionally glide into view of each other's orbits. Attempts to portray their relationship as a real rivalry always feel more hopeful than anything. When Messi says stuff like, "We don't compete with each other to see who is the better player, we do so for the benefit of our teams," you get the dispiriting sense that he means it. It's hard to put a finger on what's missing, but here's one way to think about it. In a classic sports dichotomy, you know that each player needs the other. Their whole careers would be different, and somehow lesser, if they hadn't been faced with this rival. (Yes, even if the void meant they would have won more games.) Had Roger Federer never taken up tennis, Rafa Nadal's legacy would be altered beyond recognition. Same goes for Russell-Chamberlain, Brady-Manning, Ali-Frazier, and any number of others. But how would Messi's legacy change if Ronaldo were a waiter in Lisbon right now? It's a little easier to say how Ronaldo's career would be different if Messi had never played — Madrid might never have plonked down $130 million to buy him if they didn't need a counterweight to the Argentine star. But he'd still be a divisive superstar scoring absurd numbers of goals for one of the world's biggest teams. It would just be a question of which one. Actually, that's only half true. Ronaldo's game wouldn't be transformed (nor would the mirrored shades, rhinestone belt buckles, hair-gel doomsdays, et al.), but the way he's perceived might be. Ronaldo is, at the moment, pretty seriously underappreciated by soccer fans. Everyone agrees that he's a great player, but he's a great player whom it's weirdly cool to disparage. English commentators speculate about whether he's really better than Nani.3 Aficionados turn up their noses at his high-octane, super-elaborate, step-over-heavy style.4 Fans question whether Jose Mourinho should leave him out of the lineup. Even writers who defend him often take a condescending tone, as Cruyff did in an El Periodico column a few months ago: Those actions that he wants to do in a matter of two or three minutes can't be done so quickly and he has to learn to be more patient, so he can distribute his strengths throughout the game. Second, being a great player as he is, he'll learn how to select the best position to be on the field. Can you imagine anyone writing this way about Messi? And yet Ronaldo is so bad at selecting the best position on the field that he scored a La Liga-record 40 goals last season — nine more than Messi — and netted 54 in all competitions. At 26, he's won three league titles, four domestic cups, and a Champions League. Not exactly a loser's résumé. But people still talk about him as though he's an embarrassing case of squandered talent. Why is this? Some of the obvious reasons apply: Ronaldo's team has beaten Barcelona only once in eight matches since he arrived, Ronaldo didn't score his first goal against Barca until April 2011, and so on. But it goes deeper than that, and I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that soccer fans just really, really love Lionel Messi. This is where the powerful contrast they present starts to work against Ronaldo. You can divide all soccer players — maybe all athletes — into two groups: the rational and the irrational. Rational players do what they look like they do. They look athletic, and they are athletic. They look balanced, and they are balanced. Ronaldo is a rational player; you could spot him on the beach and think, "Wow, dude looks like he was built to play soccer." Irrational players come out of nowhere. They don't instantly look like they'd excel at the sports they excel at, but somehow when they get out on the field/pitch/court, something weird clicks into place and it works.5 There's nothing about Messi that says "athlete," but put him on the pitch and magic just breaks out. For whatever reason, the best soccer dichotomies usually involve a rational player alongside an irrational player. Pele, who was supremely rational, was always contrasted with Garrincha, who was supremely irrational, and then Maradona, who was 5-foot-5 and cobbled together like a bulldog. Cruyff was a skinny ballerina compared to the powerfully built Beckenbauer. Rational players are easy to admire, but irrational players are easy to love.6 They seem to need us more, somehow, and their games bring us closer to the miraculous. Not surprisingly, they tend to strike deeper connections with fans.7 By every measure, Pele was more important to soccer than Maradona, but ask hardcore soccer fans which star they prefer and Maradona wins every time. It's no coincidence that at the Maracana, Brazil's national stadium, the away dressing room is named for Pele and the home dressing room for Garrincha. In that sense, Messi was always likely to be more beloved than Ronaldo. But it goes even further. Irrational players — this is a horrible generalization, but bear with me — tend to have difficult, or at least eccentric, personalities that work to some degree to keep fans away. Maradona's post-stardom career of narrowly averted cocaine suicide, dramatic obesity, and authoritarian-dictator-befriending is the most obvious example, but Cruyff was an iconoclastic perfectionist prone to unexplained freak-outs,8 and Garrincha was an unstable womanizer who drank himself to death at 49. But Messi is a spectacular exception. He plays for his boyhood club and stays out of the newspapers; by all accounts, he's a sweetheart, probably the best living athlete whose hair you can plausibly imaging tousling. It's Ronaldo, who thinks fans boo him "because I'm rich, handsome, and a great player," who's the Speedo-sporting asshole of the pair. In other words, poor Cristiano is on the wrong side of some powerful cultural forces. Given an improbably magical player with an improbably likable personality who, oh, by the way, happens to play for the most beloved and stylish team on the planet, fans are going to resist thinking he could have a rival at all, regardless of what happens on the pitch. You want to feel — I do, anyway — that no one could possibly be in Messi's league. And so, in the same way that Real Madrid has been transformed over the past few years into a sort of negative index of Barcelona's greatness, Ronaldo has become the designated hate object whose preordained role is to not be as good as Messi. In some weird way, discounting his talent means taking a stand against arrogance, pointlessly flashy play, and the soullessness of soccer mercenaries.9 And that sucks, both because it's mildly hypocritical — Barcelona has bought its share of mercenaries — and because Ronaldo himself is both a tremendously fun and a tremendously effective player whom fans ought to be able to enjoy. Even his outsize villainousness, which often makes him seem like a cross between Apollo Creed and mid-'80s Billy Zabka, adds something kind of wonderful. Give him his due. He's won a pile of trophies, broken some seriously impressive records, and frequently carried a Madrid team that's been pieced together out of mismatched parts.10 No, he's not as good as Messi, but he's closer than most of us let on. Over the long run, having a credible rival at the top of the game would make Messi seem better, not worse. And if they're ever going to form the dichotomy they seem designed for, it would be nice if the rest of us were prepared to notice. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrew 4221 Posted October 4, 2011 Share Posted October 4, 2011 That was a nice read Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kevin S. Assilleekunt 1 Posted October 4, 2011 Share Posted October 4, 2011 It's easy to hate Ronaldo because he's an absolute prick. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
McFaul 35 Posted October 4, 2011 Share Posted October 4, 2011 That was a nice read Stopped reading after 2 paragraphs as it screamed I am a yank writing about football at me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lake Bells tits 1 Posted October 4, 2011 Share Posted October 4, 2011 (edited) Still a nice write-up, but he is reading too much in it imo. Ronaldo is a homo-dressed prick who dives and whines, Messi gets the shit kick out of him and says nothing while still playing better. Thats why one gets alot of stick and the other doesnt. Edited October 4, 2011 by Saltwater Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Howay 12460 Posted October 4, 2011 Share Posted October 4, 2011 Still a nice write-up, but he is reading too much in it imo. Ronaldo is a homo-dressed prick who dives and whines, Messi gets the shit kick out of him and says nothing while still playing better. Thats why one gets alot of stick and the other doesnt. Aye that about sums it up like. Most people recognize Ronaldo as the 2nd best player at the moment but just happen to also think he's a cockend, also not sure I've heard anybody say he's wasting his talents or whatever the article says. Stevie's right it does scream yank like, very weird that he sees Cruyff slating Ronaldo as an issue, not really surprising a Barca legend making negative remarks about a Real Madrid player. It's an ok read but I don't think anyone doubts how good C.Ronaldo is, I must have missed the English journalists that rate Nani as being as good as Ronaldo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manc-mag 1 Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 That was a nice read Stopped reading after 2 paragraphs as it screamed I am a yank writing about football at me. I didnt get past the word "soccer" tbh. I threw my monitor out the window and sent 2J the bill. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kid Dynamite 5912 Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 Ronaldo is obviously a great player but you just wonder how many games Real could have won if he didn't insist on smashing every free kick over the bar and shooting at every given opportunity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Holden McGroin 4862 Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 Ronaldo is obviously a great player but you just wonder how many games Real could have won if he didn't insist on smashing every free kick over the bar and shooting at every given opportunity. How many games might they have NOT have won if he buried some of those ? On a side note, I read a stat last week that the player that had given away possession most in La Liga this season was Lionel Messi. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manc-mag 1 Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 Ronaldo is obviously a great player but you just wonder how many games Real could have won if he didn't insist on smashing every free kick over the bar and shooting at every given opportunity. How many games might they have NOT have won if he buried some of those ? On a side note, I read a stat last week that the player that had given away possession most in La Liga this season was Lionel Messi. I wouldn't be surprised at that like, but the possession will have mainly been lost deep in the opponents half when theres three players on him-one he's just dribbled past and chasing him and two he's dribbling at who have dropped off to mark him. Maradona lost loads of possession that way too. Very different to players squandering it in their own half under no pressure with easy passes on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrew 4221 Posted October 5, 2011 Share Posted October 5, 2011 Ronaldo is obviously a great player but you just wonder how many games Real could have won if he didn't insist on smashing every free kick over the bar and shooting at every given opportunity. How many games might they have NOT have won if he buried some of those ? but the difference, being a slightly better decision maker/slightly more selfish player would still have him scoring a shit load of goals and probably laying on a lot more rather than smashing over/wide small change, big difference Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tooj 17 Posted November 23, 2011 Share Posted November 23, 2011 Anybody see his through ball tonight for Barca's 3rd? Breathtaking. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Monroe Transfer 0 Posted November 23, 2011 Share Posted November 23, 2011 No Danny Guthrie tbh Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tom 13847 Posted November 23, 2011 Share Posted November 23, 2011 Anybody see his through ball tonight for Barca's 3rd? Breathtaking. Almost as Milan's defence was breathtakingly bad for it. They were ball watching and not one of them tracked Xavi's run, giving a goal for free practically. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DEADMAN 0 Posted November 24, 2011 Share Posted November 24, 2011 why do people hate ronaldo for hes a good player. you should be hating balotelli hes a right cunterhead prick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Monroe Transfer 0 Posted November 24, 2011 Share Posted November 24, 2011 Sold himself to EA Sports. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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