First game of the preseason and it really felt nice to see them play again. The result of the game is meaningless, as we were just in the first week of training and Dundee are at the end of their preparation and will start into the league next week. Therefore, win, draw, defeat, whatever, would have been meaningless.
Overall, I really really really enjoyed Touré, who despite it being his first game ever for Barca, tried to take responsibility, was always available for getting the ball, asked for it and overall, had a promising debut. He might need time to adapt to the tempo and again, that game is absolutely meaningless, but still, it was a promising start. I just hope that he gets another number, as I stronly believe in the curse of the 17(previous players carrying the 17 include Petit, Bogarde, Christanval if I'm not wrong and Van Bommel). Abidal had a solid debut in defense, but offensively, he pretty much showed that his crossing and everything is really weak. But he is a good worker, and sometimes, your team simply needs people working over people playing.
Eto'o in the first half was great, and I would have liked to see him in the second half with Henry, however, what I saw of Bojane and Giovani was pretty nice too.
Overall, the new signings seem to really make sense and that was pretty important after last season.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Corinthians break off partnership with MSI
Corinthians is one of the most wonderful clubs in the world. Apart of having a great list of celebrity supporters(Lula, the late Ayrton Senna just to mention two), the club also were responsible for one of the most important democracy movements in football, the Corinthians Democracy, that in some way or other had a role in the democracy movement of Brazil in the 80ies.Also, they are the team of the working class in Sao Paulo, unlike FC Sao Paulo and Santos, and had no racial seperation policy like Palmeiras had.
So all in all, for Corinthians you could argue the "more than a club" status.
However, in the past years, they had signed a deal with the devil, namely MSI, a pretty shady company led by Iranian Kia Joorabchian, who probably made his fortunes through money laundry for Russian oligarchs.
So it was pretty difficult in the past years to have sympathy with Corinthians.
But thank God, the deal is over, and despite the struggle in the league, they will hopefully survive.
So all in all, for Corinthians you could argue the "more than a club" status.
However, in the past years, they had signed a deal with the devil, namely MSI, a pretty shady company led by Iranian Kia Joorabchian, who probably made his fortunes through money laundry for Russian oligarchs.
So it was pretty difficult in the past years to have sympathy with Corinthians.
But thank God, the deal is over, and despite the struggle in the league, they will hopefully survive.
Monday, July 23, 2007
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Le Week-End de Merde
I don't wanna talk about Iran's defeat. Utter disaster, utterly disgusted, utterly..god damn.
There are too many other issues. My urologe, 34 years of age, suffered from some high blood pressure thing and is now in ICU at AKH. If he gets lucky, he will be half sided disabled, otherwise he will die. You really don't know what's worse. Being half-sided disabled or to die at 34.
Another personal disaster, not as bad as that, but still, was that I had moved all my pictures, music files and videos on an external hard disk I had bought. All of a sudden though, I couldn't read that external disk anymore and everything was gone.
Now, it wasn't such a problem with my music, as I have them all on my iPod and can transfer them. But the real tragedy was with my pictures. It was a collection of around 4 years of photos, 4 years of memories, 4 years of my life in pictures, all gone.
Somehow I managed to get a recovery programme for free on cnet.com and I could recover almost 90% of my pictures, although mostly a bit corrupted, but anyway, it's better than nothing.
The 4 years included pictures of my grandfather who died in February and lots of other beautiful memories. Everything was gone in around 30 seconds.
I researched a bit and realised that that External Hard Disk I had bought was simply rubbish, as lots of other people had the same problems. It's a Maxtor Personal Storage something, but produced by Seagate, who are actually good when it comes to hard disks. But this one was simply utter rubbish as I can't access the hard disk anymore and all my files seem to be gone.
What has life come to, that so many dear things are gone by a split second, be it human life, things defining human life, or anything else that makes life beautiful?
Modern Life is Rubbish...
There are too many other issues. My urologe, 34 years of age, suffered from some high blood pressure thing and is now in ICU at AKH. If he gets lucky, he will be half sided disabled, otherwise he will die. You really don't know what's worse. Being half-sided disabled or to die at 34.
Another personal disaster, not as bad as that, but still, was that I had moved all my pictures, music files and videos on an external hard disk I had bought. All of a sudden though, I couldn't read that external disk anymore and everything was gone.
Now, it wasn't such a problem with my music, as I have them all on my iPod and can transfer them. But the real tragedy was with my pictures. It was a collection of around 4 years of photos, 4 years of memories, 4 years of my life in pictures, all gone.
Somehow I managed to get a recovery programme for free on cnet.com and I could recover almost 90% of my pictures, although mostly a bit corrupted, but anyway, it's better than nothing.
The 4 years included pictures of my grandfather who died in February and lots of other beautiful memories. Everything was gone in around 30 seconds.
I researched a bit and realised that that External Hard Disk I had bought was simply rubbish, as lots of other people had the same problems. It's a Maxtor Personal Storage something, but produced by Seagate, who are actually good when it comes to hard disks. But this one was simply utter rubbish as I can't access the hard disk anymore and all my files seem to be gone.
What has life come to, that so many dear things are gone by a split second, be it human life, things defining human life, or anything else that makes life beautiful?
Modern Life is Rubbish...
Friday, July 20, 2007
Math Bus
I don't know how many people know about the Bang Bus(I won't link it, just google it) but you better know about the Math Bus.
Monday, July 16, 2007
The Law of Zanetti
If there's one absolute law, rule, theorem, whatever in football, it's the following:
Pupi's law: Javier Zanetti can not play a bad game, no matter how bad his teammates play.
I have not seen in 10 years of football and watching him play one single bad game of him. You might argue that maybe I have seen too little games of him, but my friend who is Interista and has seen all of his games over the past 10 years doesn't remember a single bad game of him either. It's simply impossible. Just like Kepler's laws, Maxwell's laws, Gauss Theorem or whatever else you want to come up with, this is a law of football, that it's impossible to catch Javier Zanetti having a bad day, a bad game, or whatever else.
The worse it feels to see this great player not getting the full credit he deserves. While Cafu is regarded by many as the best rightback of the past decade, I would argue the case for Pupi, simply because in terms of consistency no one came even close to him. His problem seem to be that he is too nice of a guy and he always faced a moron as a coach, at least for Argentina.
Whether it was Passarella, who didn't take the great Redondo to the World Cup in 98, Bielsa who played the great but old and out of form Batistuta, over the great and in good form Hernan Crespo, or benched the great Pablito Aimar for the rubbish Ariel Ortega or Jose Pekerman, who somehow thought Scaloni and Coloccini are just as good as rightbacks as Zanetti is and didn't take him to the World Cup at all, it somehow wasn't meant to be for Javier to have the great success on national team level. And despite the two scudettos the past 2 years and the UEFA-Cup...don't get me started on his career at Inter.
All in all, Pupi for me was one of the main reasons I always had a soft spot for Inter, despite everything. All the best for his future career. In my book, he will go down as a legend and the model rightback and athlete.
Official Site
Fundacion PUPI
Pupi's law: Javier Zanetti can not play a bad game, no matter how bad his teammates play.
I have not seen in 10 years of football and watching him play one single bad game of him. You might argue that maybe I have seen too little games of him, but my friend who is Interista and has seen all of his games over the past 10 years doesn't remember a single bad game of him either. It's simply impossible. Just like Kepler's laws, Maxwell's laws, Gauss Theorem or whatever else you want to come up with, this is a law of football, that it's impossible to catch Javier Zanetti having a bad day, a bad game, or whatever else.
The worse it feels to see this great player not getting the full credit he deserves. While Cafu is regarded by many as the best rightback of the past decade, I would argue the case for Pupi, simply because in terms of consistency no one came even close to him. His problem seem to be that he is too nice of a guy and he always faced a moron as a coach, at least for Argentina.
Whether it was Passarella, who didn't take the great Redondo to the World Cup in 98, Bielsa who played the great but old and out of form Batistuta, over the great and in good form Hernan Crespo, or benched the great Pablito Aimar for the rubbish Ariel Ortega or Jose Pekerman, who somehow thought Scaloni and Coloccini are just as good as rightbacks as Zanetti is and didn't take him to the World Cup at all, it somehow wasn't meant to be for Javier to have the great success on national team level. And despite the two scudettos the past 2 years and the UEFA-Cup...don't get me started on his career at Inter.
All in all, Pupi for me was one of the main reasons I always had a soft spot for Inter, despite everything. All the best for his future career. In my book, he will go down as a legend and the model rightback and athlete.
Official Site
Fundacion PUPI
Sunday, July 15, 2007
All Praise Due to Mobali
Iman Mobali is a player I truly adore, because simply among all Iranian players he is the one with the most footballing intelligence. The only Iranian player who would be of Cruyff's taste is him. I would have written a total praise for Mobali, but I had to keep it this way. Nonetheless, Mobali rules.
Article on ISP
----------------------------------------------------
Nekounam and his Partner in Crime
IranSportsPress.com - The game against China was apart of all the intense action a very interesting one in terms of tactics and how the performance of one player can change the game of a whole team.
Mahdi Rahimi
The two halfves against China were completely opposite in terms of performance. While in the first half Iran didn't really know what was going on and they were blitzed by China, in the second half China didn't have anything to say and Iran controlled the game with relative ease. If Iran's first half performance had been half as good as the one in the second half, they would have won the game relatively easy. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough for 3 points, but coming back from being 2-0 down and drawing 2-2 still tastes good. But what was the reason? Simply said, the reason was Nekounam.
The point is not that Nekounam played bad in the first half and good in the second half. The point is more, that Nekounam had no one to play with in the first half, but had a partner in crime in the second half.
Nekounam has always been a player who preferred possesion over simply playing forward. There's a huge difference there we have to understand first. When you play forward, you simply play forward, you release the ball quickly, you try to give the game speed etc. When you play on possesion, you try to control the ball and have the ball in your team for most of the time. It doesn't matter for you whether you play forward, backward, north, south, east, west, slow, fast...you just try to have the ball and keep it away from the opponent. It even makes sense. When you have possesion, the opponent doesn't and hence it's difficult for him to score. This type of play has developed even further during his time in Spain, where the player in his position has to be able to control the ball and control possesion. However, in the first half Nekounam was left alone with his plan. No one else really seemed to care about possesion. The other player in Iran's team who would have cared too about possesion was Zandi, but Zandi, specially in the beginning had too much to do with defensive work on his side and couldn't help Javad.
In the second half the key to Javad's Man of the Match peformance came in, it was Iman Mobali. Mobali doesn't play in Spain, but he has the footballing brain of a La Liga player. Mobali, like Javad, doesn't care about going forward. He cares about possesion and space and he tries to use that space. Iman doesn't play the long pass forward, he plays the ball that makes sure his team remains in possesion or at least even if they lose possesion have enough time to regroup and win the ball back. Javad finally had a player apart of Zandi who understood his football, and Iran had possesion, had chances, and outplayed China in what was one of the best performances of our team in a long time. And Nekounam wasn't Nekounam anymore, he was NekouMAN, a Superhero as a 6, becuse he finally had his Robin, his Sundance Kid, his Starsky, his partner in crime.
Iman replacing Karimi, who had a shocker of a game, and giving our game a whole new dimension by keeping possesion, slow build up and excellent passing, made us control China for 45 minutes, and we could have scored a 3rd one too, while after the first 30 minutes, we could have been 3-0 behind.
I don't want to give too much credit to the coaching staff today because they did too many things wrong, and they did so many things wrong, that it's not even funny, but credit again to them for making the right sub and replacing Karimi with Mobali, which was a huge move.
I had mentioned before, that it's important to learn from mistakes. The coaching staff hadn't unfortunately learned that it's a mistake to play Enayati on the left wing as he is hugely ineffective on that position. It remains to be seen whether they will learn in the next games or not. As far as the leftback position is concerned, despite everything Zandi simply doesn't seem to be the solution. I prefer Zandi over Madanchi as a leftback, simply because Zandi is an incredibly intelligent player, but it might just be best to play Nosrati, Aghili or even Rezaei there and push Zandi forward. That way we might not have to stay through another early scare in the quarterfinals, as Zandi as a leftback against either Saudi Arabia or Korea would be complete suicide and a waste of such a brilliant player.
If we learn from the mistakes, we might go somewhere. If not, we shouldn't make it further than quarterfinals.
You can watch the goals of the game here
Article on ISP
----------------------------------------------------
Nekounam and his Partner in Crime
IranSportsPress.com - The game against China was apart of all the intense action a very interesting one in terms of tactics and how the performance of one player can change the game of a whole team.
Mahdi Rahimi
The two halfves against China were completely opposite in terms of performance. While in the first half Iran didn't really know what was going on and they were blitzed by China, in the second half China didn't have anything to say and Iran controlled the game with relative ease. If Iran's first half performance had been half as good as the one in the second half, they would have won the game relatively easy. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough for 3 points, but coming back from being 2-0 down and drawing 2-2 still tastes good. But what was the reason? Simply said, the reason was Nekounam.
The point is not that Nekounam played bad in the first half and good in the second half. The point is more, that Nekounam had no one to play with in the first half, but had a partner in crime in the second half.
Nekounam has always been a player who preferred possesion over simply playing forward. There's a huge difference there we have to understand first. When you play forward, you simply play forward, you release the ball quickly, you try to give the game speed etc. When you play on possesion, you try to control the ball and have the ball in your team for most of the time. It doesn't matter for you whether you play forward, backward, north, south, east, west, slow, fast...you just try to have the ball and keep it away from the opponent. It even makes sense. When you have possesion, the opponent doesn't and hence it's difficult for him to score. This type of play has developed even further during his time in Spain, where the player in his position has to be able to control the ball and control possesion. However, in the first half Nekounam was left alone with his plan. No one else really seemed to care about possesion. The other player in Iran's team who would have cared too about possesion was Zandi, but Zandi, specially in the beginning had too much to do with defensive work on his side and couldn't help Javad.
In the second half the key to Javad's Man of the Match peformance came in, it was Iman Mobali. Mobali doesn't play in Spain, but he has the footballing brain of a La Liga player. Mobali, like Javad, doesn't care about going forward. He cares about possesion and space and he tries to use that space. Iman doesn't play the long pass forward, he plays the ball that makes sure his team remains in possesion or at least even if they lose possesion have enough time to regroup and win the ball back. Javad finally had a player apart of Zandi who understood his football, and Iran had possesion, had chances, and outplayed China in what was one of the best performances of our team in a long time. And Nekounam wasn't Nekounam anymore, he was NekouMAN, a Superhero as a 6, becuse he finally had his Robin, his Sundance Kid, his Starsky, his partner in crime.
Iman replacing Karimi, who had a shocker of a game, and giving our game a whole new dimension by keeping possesion, slow build up and excellent passing, made us control China for 45 minutes, and we could have scored a 3rd one too, while after the first 30 minutes, we could have been 3-0 behind.
I don't want to give too much credit to the coaching staff today because they did too many things wrong, and they did so many things wrong, that it's not even funny, but credit again to them for making the right sub and replacing Karimi with Mobali, which was a huge move.
I had mentioned before, that it's important to learn from mistakes. The coaching staff hadn't unfortunately learned that it's a mistake to play Enayati on the left wing as he is hugely ineffective on that position. It remains to be seen whether they will learn in the next games or not. As far as the leftback position is concerned, despite everything Zandi simply doesn't seem to be the solution. I prefer Zandi over Madanchi as a leftback, simply because Zandi is an incredibly intelligent player, but it might just be best to play Nosrati, Aghili or even Rezaei there and push Zandi forward. That way we might not have to stay through another early scare in the quarterfinals, as Zandi as a leftback against either Saudi Arabia or Korea would be complete suicide and a waste of such a brilliant player.
If we learn from the mistakes, we might go somewhere. If not, we shouldn't make it further than quarterfinals.
You can watch the goals of the game here
Saturday, July 14, 2007
The Asian Cup
So far the Asian Cup has been pretty entertaining. The quality of the games is not on level with let's say Copa America, but compared to the Gold Cup it's World Cup 86.
From the host nations, Indonesia have so far played the best football followed by Vietnam, coached by Alfred Riedl, a very likeable Austrian coach, something pretty rare. Indonesia's game today against Saudi Arabia was maybe the best of the tournament so far. I personally sort of like Saudi Arabia's new team, as they play pretty fast and attacking football and Qahtani is a great attacker. The game against Indonesia was end to end action with chances on both sides, but in the end, Saudis were simply more clinical.
Yesterday's game of Iraq-Australia was equally brilliant. My friend Babak Golriz has written an article on Iraq's young princes, so I will leave it with that. Overall, what Iraq played was amazing. Very intense, very brilliant. As for Australia, surely Hiddink was a big factor and these guys believed that Oman and Iraq shouldn't be much more different than Samoa and Tuvalu. In the words of Biggie "YOU'RE DEAD WRONG!"
Iran will play tomorrow against China. I believe we have a great chance to beat them, as our team is better and they want revenge for the unlucky defeat last time. Somehow, I'm quite enthusiastic about this new team, because you feel that they have fun on the field again, unlike the dire past years under Daei, where everyone was just there to play and go home. But now, you really feel that they got lots of fun.
That's why I believe that they will go far and maybe even bring the cup back home.
These are pictures of a team having fun....
From the host nations, Indonesia have so far played the best football followed by Vietnam, coached by Alfred Riedl, a very likeable Austrian coach, something pretty rare. Indonesia's game today against Saudi Arabia was maybe the best of the tournament so far. I personally sort of like Saudi Arabia's new team, as they play pretty fast and attacking football and Qahtani is a great attacker. The game against Indonesia was end to end action with chances on both sides, but in the end, Saudis were simply more clinical.
Yesterday's game of Iraq-Australia was equally brilliant. My friend Babak Golriz has written an article on Iraq's young princes, so I will leave it with that. Overall, what Iraq played was amazing. Very intense, very brilliant. As for Australia, surely Hiddink was a big factor and these guys believed that Oman and Iraq shouldn't be much more different than Samoa and Tuvalu. In the words of Biggie "YOU'RE DEAD WRONG!"
Iran will play tomorrow against China. I believe we have a great chance to beat them, as our team is better and they want revenge for the unlucky defeat last time. Somehow, I'm quite enthusiastic about this new team, because you feel that they have fun on the field again, unlike the dire past years under Daei, where everyone was just there to play and go home. But now, you really feel that they got lots of fun.
That's why I believe that they will go far and maybe even bring the cup back home.
These are pictures of a team having fun....
Friday, July 13, 2007
Kamaal The Abstract
I finally got the whole Kamaal the Abstract album. Somehow, L.A.Reid didn't like the album and didn't think of publishing it in 2002, so it got shelved and...well, long story short, L.A.Reid robbed the world from one of the greatest albums ever, which is a real shame.
The stuff Outkast/Andre 3000 did on Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, was basically what Q-Tip did before on Kamaal the Abstract, just that Kamaal the Abstract was incredibly much better. Q-Tip was just way ahead of his time and after Pete Rock, Prince, and many others, he was yet another victim of a record label having no clue about shit.
You can listen to the album here.
And if you liked it, you can sign this petition to release it.
The stuff Outkast/Andre 3000 did on Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, was basically what Q-Tip did before on Kamaal the Abstract, just that Kamaal the Abstract was incredibly much better. Q-Tip was just way ahead of his time and after Pete Rock, Prince, and many others, he was yet another victim of a record label having no clue about shit.
You can listen to the album here.
And if you liked it, you can sign this petition to release it.
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