Futbol 2020-21

[Antoine]

Code: Select all

init();

[DarkAttraktor]

we suck majestically, have 0 identity as a team and our NT's is a showcase for players of 2-3 powerful managers and other vested interets from Savez but we're now 1 hurdle away from booking a game with CRO on the EURO's next year. a win against the scots in belgrade in november takes us there.

nonetheless, a potential match with croatia on a major competition would by all means be one of the sporting highlights of 2021 and possibly the whole decade.

[surfer]

Yes SMS with a second half brace. Exciting, I didnt watch the match but was following the scores. His second goal was really special, always a fan of a good chip, but the angle and closeness of it made it outstanding. I cant believe he's still at Lazio. Congrats DA.

[DarkAttraktor]

thanks surf.

that goal is terribly swaggy but also horribly risky. you really need to be a kind of a sociopath and to not care one bit about whether people will hate your guts if you happen to miss it in cruchtime of an elimination game. and maybe the best thing about it is that he made it with his weaker foot.

i still don't like the idea of basing our play on SMS because he is far too much of a specific type of player who is usable in only like 15% of systems that teams play today. and in order to utilize him well you really need to have a good coach and system of play and we don't have none of that by definition since we are ad hoc-istan. BUT i kinda like the idea of using him as we did against the norwegians - as a joker, a surprise factor. having a towering midfielder with excellent technical skill and ibrahimovic level swag to throw at opponents' groggy defenses at the 65 minute mark is kinda awesome.

also i hate the basketballization of our NT with this freakish average height we are nurturing - like we are some talentless nation of sturdy woodcutters from the north. if serbian football desperately needs something - these are lightfooted speedy guys and short guys with a low centre of gravity who can play with both feet, not these SMS type giants that need like 5 seconds to turn around. last time i tuned in on CRO (against Spain i think), they had minimum 3 players (but maybe more) that could play with both feet, while we had only 1. if you zoom in on what sort of players we produce vs what croatia produces, that data alone kinda sums up the difference. i am maybe a bit old school here, but the number of two-footed players that your youth systems produce for the NT is kinda like a nice (synecdochical) benchmark of the overall level of technical prowess that can be acquired in a given youth system.

[surfer]

Nothing wrong with a good ol fashioned toe bash

[surfer]

I thought Croatia played well today. The squad is in a transition phase with Lovren, Vida, Modric, Rakitic (retired), Perisic all over 31, and the younger generation still settling. The Vida / Lovren partnership needs to be broken up, Caleta-Car is a better option. Vlasic is proving to be a good attacking midfielder. Not sure how Pasalic fits in. Brekalo also deserves more minutes. Kovacic played well after coming on in the 2nd half, but can he play with Modric and Vlasic? And who is the striker? An interesting team with lots of options, should be a strong squad for next year's Euros.

[DarkAttraktor]

just listened to Ciro Blazevic on a YT podcast. he's 85 but man, he is such a stooge and generally lovable character.

its super strange how Rakitic decided to retire - just 8 months before the competition & out of the blue. he apparently just emailed Dalic and Savez, announcing his decision to retire. luckily, he's not in his best form and certainly not an essential asset for Dalic atm.

Duje Ćaleta Car is such a funny name. it's as if you asked a Serbian to come up with an over-the-top Croatian name just for the lolz

[Antoine]

Duje Ćaleta Car is such a funny name. it's as if you asked a Serbian to come up with an over-the-top Croatian name just for the lolz

The Marseille fans made a song about him, based on this popular 80s french song : https://youtu.be/j-48Xg2cKyg (you'll guess why with the intro...)

[DarkAttraktor]

hahaaaa, that's awesome - Déćalétacar, Déćalétacar, ohé, ohé

also saw that the song got a corona lockdown rework as a part of the national mask wearing campaign. sometimes a song lays dormant for decades and all of a sudden comes a time when you can apply it for everything.

haaaaaaahaaaa, but look at this Antoine - someone edited the English wikipedia entry on La Compagnie Créole and credited Jean-Marc Vivenza - the Nouvelle Droite neo-Guenonian philosopher and musician, founder of the 1980s oldschool industrial band Vivenza - as a member of the band. they placed Marigot in the French Saint-Martin as his birthplace and credited him with playing "Keyboards, intonarumori, percussion" in the band. he's playing Russoloian turn-of-the-century noise machines in a Caribbean pop band

[DarkAttraktor]

and a short note ontopic: i am no reds fan but Pickford should go to jail for that tackle. it's not a classic foul with an intention to injure - it's just incomprehensibly irresponsible.

[surfer]

Inconceivable

[surfer]

its super strange how Rakitic decided to retire - just 8 months before the competition & out of the blue. he apparently just emailed Dalic and Savez, announcing his decision to retire. luckily, he's not in his best form and certainly not an essential asset for Dalic atm.

I thought it was sudden but not surprising in the big picture, he's in a different phase of his career moving on from Barca and the WC final marks an obvious stopping point. There are a lot of AMs that he is blocking and he isnt as crucial a player as perhaps Modric, whom the national team doesnt have an obvious replacement for. It surprises me that more of that generation didnt retire. Even Modric. But its clear how much they still rely on him in so many ways, not just as the glue and deep lying playmaker, but in a more expansive role than he usually plays at RM. Rakitic is replaceable but Modric is not.

I made the mistake of watching Atalanta play Napoli on Saturday, and now I have to realize that Gasperini's team isnt going to win anything this year. What a lackluster, somnambulant performance, their backline is atrocious. I'm sure its just a bad match, but there is so much competition in Serie A this year, Its hard to see them winning anything with inconsistent unfocused performances like that. Napoli looked sharp, AC Zlatan is back, Serie A is going to be seriously interesting this year.

Then I switched over to Everton and saw that awful challenge on VvD, so late, so high, so clumsy, knee on knee. I think he knew right away it was bad he was calling for the physio straight away. Out for the year probably. Even before the injury, I'm wasnt sure Liverpool had the drive and energy for another serious run, but now its going to be even tougher. Opens things up, especially with the lack of fans, we could see another Leicester like outsider make a run.

As far as Spurs, the first half was as good a display of football as they played since prime Poch. I've been wrong about so many things this year:

1. Spurs will be boring because Mourinho plays boring football
2. Kane cant be effective if he is forced to drop deep into the #10 role
3. Mourinho will shore up the defense straightaway
4. All the new players will take a while to bed in
5. Levy wont spend any money in the transfer window
6. Ndombele's days at Spurs are numbered
7. Spurs have pretty much no chance at Top 4

et cetera.

Hard to be mad at Lanzini's strike, that was a 1 in a million. It seemed to go in slow motion, floating into the top corner. Those strikes never go in, coming across his body and slicing it the shooter inevitably slices it wide, or it balloons over the bar, it is so hard to keep those on target. Plus it didnt even seem like he would get a good crack at it because of Winks closing his down.

I am reminded of a sports announcer in USA who during a very famous moment, it was the deciding game of the 1993 World Series and the Blue Jays were playing the Phillies and it was in extra innings meaning whomever scored next won not just the game, and the series, but the championship. And Joe Carter hit a home run which ended the game. The only time in WS history that a WS was won with a home run. The announcer Tom Cheek made a very famous call he says "Touch 'em all Joe, you'll never hit a bigger home run in your life!) (just Google Touch Em All and it'll auto complete the rest). I felt like calling to Lanzini as he ripped off his jersey in celebration, "Take it off Manuel, you'll never score a better goal in your life."

[surfer]

Also Aguero needs to be suspended for that. Cant have that. Not malicious but really condescending and disrespectful. Cannot condone that stuff.

[surfer]

thanks surf.

that goal is terribly swaggy but also horribly risky. you really need to be a kind of a sociopath and to not care one bit about whether people will hate your guts if you happen to miss it in cruchtime of an elimination game. and maybe the best thing about it is that he made it with his weaker foot.

No worse and arguably much better than those players (and there as been more in recent years) who attempt a panenka in a penalty shootout with elimination on the line. eg that Slovakian who chipped Ireland keeper in the Euro playoff shootout.


https://www.goal.com/en-us/news/i-am-st ... evhzl24ng9

[roger.haddad.]

and a short note ontopic: i am no reds fan but Pickford should go to jail for that tackle. it's not a classic foul with an intention to injure - it's just incomprehensibly irresponsible.

Indeed, shocking. More shocking was the lack of action by the FA retroactively. Between the shit officiating and the VAR rules that change every other week, the PL is getting hard to watch for me.

[Antoine]

Following two successful test events in the last 14 days, the club is pleased to be able to announce our new live streaming partnership with StreamAMG which is in conjunction with the SPFL and Pixellot.

This exciting new partnership means that ICTFC will utilise live footage supplied by the newly installed Pixellot camera system installed at Caledonian Stadium. The Pixellot system uses cameras with in-built, AI, ball-tracking technology to produce live HD footage of all home SPFL Championship matches at Caledonian Stadium, which will then be broadcast directly to ICTFC Season Ticket holders and those purchasing a PPV match via a centrally operated streaming platform at StreamAMG.

And what is happening when the linesman is bald?
=> https://youtu.be/9zoJP2FkpgU
(some fans suggest he could wear a hat)

[Antoine]

https://twitter.com/A_Espresati/status/ ... 5977845760

[DarkAttraktor]

haha, i knew waiting for the whole clip to end was worth it

just came here to post this epic ownage

[surfer]

Great article! Its behind a paywall so I will paste it. Bodo/Glimt got to the third round of Europa qualifying before they ran into Milan and had to play at the San Siro, losing 3-2.


Norway Has a Must-See Team. Barely Anyone Can Watch It.



Bodo/Glimt is on the cusp of its first championship, a soccer success story built on style and innovation. But its golden year has played out in front of nearly empty stands.


By Rory Smith
Nov. 8, 2020

The best perch is on the rooftop overlooking the stadium. Reaching it is not for the fainthearted: The only access is via an external staircase, and most of the field can be seen only if you sit right on the lip of the building. But still, during most games, a handful of hardy fans have made the journey up there.

If anything, others have had to be even more creative. Before one match over the summer, one group of fans hired a cherry picker, parked it outside the stadium, climbed into its basket, and then extended its hydraulic arm until they could see the field.

The stunt resulted in a fine for the club, but it was accepted with a laconic grin. The club’s executives understood that nobody in Bodo, a city of 50,000 people just north of the Arctic Circle, a 16-hour drive from Oslo, has ever seen anything like this; they know that, this season, people will go to extraordinary lengths just to see Bodo/Glimt play.

This has been a golden year for the club. It stands on the cusp of claiming its first Norwegian championship. Despite a budget that is just a fraction of some of its rivals’, it has steamrollered the competition. It has won 21 of its 24 league games and scored an improbable 83 goals — and counting — in the process. It has a slew of records in its sights.

The team’s rise has captivated not only the city and the region, but the country as a whole. Frode Thomassen, Bodo/Glimt’s chief executive, said recently it had sold merchandise to new fans in every corner of Norway, and across Europe, too. Despite a traditionally small fan base, its games are suddenly a major draw for television networks. Ulrik Saltnes, the club’s captain, said barely a day had gone by without an interview request.

Orjan Berg, a former player and now a coach in the club’s youth academy, was struck during his summer vacation by the number of people who approached to congratulate him on the team’s season. “Everyone is cheering for Bodo/Glimt,” he said.

Earlier this year, when his son, Patrick, a 22-year-old midfielder for the club, won his first call-up to the Norwegian national team, he was greeted enthusiastically by Erling Haaland, Martin Odegaard and the rest of Norway’s exported superstars. “They said they didn’t normally watch much of the Norwegian league,” Berg said, “but that they were watching our games.”

The bitter reality, of course, is that few have been able to see the greatest team in the club’s history in the flesh. There is a reason fans have had to clamber up that staircase or rent construction equipment: The coronavirus has meant that, for much of the season, only 200 fans have been allowed inside Bodo’s low-slung Aspmyra Stadion for each game. Its largest attendance this year has been 600.

In a year when everyone wants to watch Bodo/Glimt, scarcely anyone can.

The Perfect Underdog

All sports produce underdog stories. Leicester City wins the Premier League. Iceland makes the World Cup. Joe Namath leads the Jets to the Super Bowl. But while such stories are rare — that is what makes them special — and while each is unique, their rhythms are familiar.


There is, generally, a charismatic coach. There is either a group of players with something to prove or a squadron of homegrown talents ready to take the world by storm. Most of the time, there is some sort of behind-the-scenes advantage — an edge that will hold for a year or two until everyone else adopts it — or some bold new style of play that takes opponents by surprise.

What makes Bodo/Glimt’s story stand out — what transforms it into almost the Platonic ideal of an underdog story — is that it contains all of those ingredients, and a few more.

The coach, in this case, is Kjetil Knutsen, a 52-year-old who inspires deep affection in his players. Saltnes said he “loves him,” and Patrick Berg praised his collectivist approach: “He listens to his players.”

The core of the squad is homegrown, the likes of Berg, Saltnes, the defender Brede Moe and the winger Jens Petter Hauge all drawn from Bodo itself or from elsewhere in the north of Norway. All came up through the club’s youth system.

“Half the first team are local boys,” Orjan Berg said. “We aim to have 40 percent of our squad from northern Norway, and 15 percent of playing minutes for local players. That is part of our identity. The fans want northern Norwegians to play.”

Prime among them is Patrick Berg, the scion of what is arguably Norway’s premier soccer family. His father, Orjan, played for the club. So did his uncles, Runar and Arild. His grandfather, Harald, is regarded as the best player in Bodo/Glimt’s history, the inspiration behind what remains — at least until the league championship is sealed — the team’s crowning achievement: lifting the Norwegian cup in 1975.

And yet, while Bodo/Glimt is a story of the shining promise of youth, it is also a story of redemption. A couple of years ago Patrick Berg, frustrated at his lack of playing time, considered leaving the team that is entwined with his family. “I was not in the right head space,” he said. “I was disappointed and angry, and I was blaming everyone else besides me.”

Saltnes, his captain, considered walking away from the game altogether, saying he had long since ceased to find soccer fun. Before games, he battled nausea and stomach cramps. He was, in hindsight, consumed by “doubts and fears.”

That was only three years ago. A few weeks back, he led the team out at San Siro for a Europa League game against A.C. Milan. “If you look at the team that day,” Saltnes said, “almost every player would have a strange story about how they ended up on that pitch. They had all been let down or injured or wanted to leave. You would never have guessed their stories.”

All of these, of course, are familiar tropes in any case study of success against the odds. What makes Bodo/Glimt especially compelling is that they are all present, all at the same time. That, in part, may explain the club’s appeal.

“We are an underdog,” said Thomassen, the chief executive. “And who doesn’t love an underdog?”



The Only Ambition Is to Have None

In the spring of 2019, Bodo/Glimt’s players traveled to Spain for their preseason training camp. Traditionally, while they were there, they would discuss their goals for the year ahead.

This time, though, they came back with a different mission. “We did away with all of that stuff,” Saltnes said. “We did not have any ambitions. We just wanted to focus on performance.”

Saltnes, like his colleagues, does not believe there is a singular explanation for what has happened to Bodo/Glimt in the past three years, a silver bullet that has transformed it from an also-ran into what many regard as the best club team Norway has seen in at least two decades.

“People always ask what the secret is, but there is no one thing or one person,” Saltnes said. “It has all happened very naturally. There was no grand vision, no map.”

The one thing that everyone agrees on, though, is that none of it would be possible without Bjorn Mannsverk. A former fighter pilot who served two tours of duty in Afghanistan and flew missions above Libya, he was hired as the team’s mental coach in 2017.

Though he was not a soccer fan — Mannsverk found the first few games he watched “boring,” though he insisted he enjoys soccer much more now. As a member of Norway’s air force, he had discovered the benefits of mental training and mindfulness, and he accepted the challenge of trying to introduce his methods to sports.

“I only had two rules,” he said. “It all had to be voluntary. And I would not be the club’s agent. I would not tell the players they should be more happy or that they should work harder.”

Initially, he found his new charges “very quiet, much more so than working with fighter pilots,” but three years later, his impact has been seismic. He runs one-on-one sessions — each lasting about 30 minutes — and group meetings. He gives the players “homework,” in which they are encouraged to reflect on their emotions and experiences. And every morning, the squad meditates before training.

Occasionally, his methods appear in plain sight: When Bodo/Glimt concedes a goal, the players regularly come together to talk it through. “Not every time,” Mannsverk said. “Sometimes there is a bit of bad luck or whatever. But if they need to, they do. This is quite rare, I think.”

Saltnes had just come from a group session with Mannsverk and several teammates when we spoke. It was, he said, intensely personal.

“We have a very open culture,” he said. “We say things to our coach that, at other clubs, might be taken as a sign of weakness.” Patrick Berg credits Mannsverk with not only helping him “as a player, but as a person, too.”

It was Mannsverk who encouraged the idea of thinking about performance, rather than results. “Focusing on results generates a lot of stress,” he said. “Focusing on performance is a really creative process.”

The results were immediate. Bodo/Glimt finished 11th in 2018, a creditable, but unspectacular, finish for a newly promoted team. Last year, it finished second, and only a late collapse prevented the club from claiming the title. This year, there will be no mistake: It will claim the championship playing an adventurous, open, expansive style of play that even Saltnes described as “kamikaze.”

“I don’t think it would be possible to play like that without Bjorn and the mental work we do,” he said. “No, I don’t think that would end very well at all.”

Shining in Empty Stands

Orjan Berg was 7 when Bodo/Glimt won that cup in 1975. He remembers that for quite a while afterward his family could not go into Bodo on a Saturday. “People just wanted to stop him and talk about football,” he said of his father. “It feels the same now.”

There is sadness, of course, that this golden year should have been played out in the near-silence of all-but-empty stadiums, but those at the club are phlegmatic about that. “Of course people would like to watch us, and we would like to have fans in, but there is not much point wasting energy on things we can’t do anything about,” Thomassen said.

That, though, is not the only poignant note in Bodo/Glimt’s uplifting story. A few hours after that game last month in Milan, it was confirmed that Hauge — the elfin winger who has been the team’s breakout star — would not be returning to Norway. Not for long, anyway. He had caught the Italian team’s eye, and it had no intention of letting him go.

He will, most likely, be the first of several key players to depart. “That is part of the football industry,” Thomassen said. “Of course, we have sponsors and that sort of thing, but the money is in selling players.” He knows that a team that does well will, soon enough, be picked apart by bigger, richer predators.

Next up might be two of the team’s imports, the Danes Philip Zinckernagel and Kasper Junker, or even the 22-year-old Berg. “Players have bigger ambitions than playing in Norway,” he said.

For him, as a local player, as a childhood fan, this season has felt “like a dream.” There is a risk for the club, though, that once it ends, dawn will bring a cold, bleak light, that when people wake up from their reverie this team that everyone wanted to watch will be gone.

Thomassen does not see it that way. When the club advertised for an under-19 coach a few weeks ago, he said, it was inundated with applications, more than 400 in all. He believes Bodo/Glimt is now more attractive to players in the rest of Norway than ever; he is full of pride at the work that has been done to improve the academy, to keep it churning out prospects.

“Many people want to be here now,” he said. “It has been a tremendous journey, but for us the adventure does not end this year. We have to keep developing, to make this the first step. We will have to make sure we win the title next year, too.”

[surfer]

Poor Iceland. They've been in decline since 2018 anyways so not surprised that their window has closed.