Quarter-final will begin in an hour.
The 8 quarter-finalists are, co-incidentally, the countries with highest populations in Europe and South America
- Russia and Colombia did not qualify, so fate/FIFA cannot control (it was alleged FIFA secretly wished the countries with biggest markets to advance further and that FIFA discriminate against Asia and Africa - but that is conspiracy from those continents)
- That Portugal sneaked in (in instead of Spain) was because of sheer luck in bracket drawing. The Netherlands (16M) should have beaten Portugal (10.5M) but Spain's "votes" when to Portugal while neighboring German "votes" stayed with Germany
- That FIFA manipulated the matches through dubious referee was obvious. Why would Switzerland (7M) miss all the penalty kicks otherwise? :) Why did FIFA keep refusing spending another couple minute to look at the video when there is dispute in referee judgment?
- This is a stupid game and I am not going to watch again. Time will be better spent studying maps
Prediction for quarter-final (according to population, or democratic voting, or FIFA marketing)- Germany, Italy, England (49M), Brazil
- Germany, Brazil
8 comments:
Yesterday was 2 out of 2.
Today, I do wish Portugal win, but am not optimistic.
Life has an unlikely twist...
Portugal won by penalty shoot-outs! Had England score, they wouldn't enter penalty shoot-out and got humiliated by Ricardo the goalkeeper again.
http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com/06/en/060701/1/8h6y.html
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_cup_2006/4991618.stm
http://2006.sina.com.cn/eng/2006-07-02/014686478.shtml
Brazil may go home too! 10 mins to go and 1 goal behind!!
i have no complain:)
although i like the brazilians more than the french.
but zidane is not just a captain and scorer, he is a 'strategist' who always know where to put the balls and is able to put it there.
but i thought he got 2 yellows and will be banished in this match?
Zidane surved a ban during the first 2nd round match, just before the quarter finals.
There was actually talk about him missing the quarters for being "too old".
HAHA! :)
since the Brazilian non-team failed even after some minor biase from the referee, history of host-continent wins world cup (i.e. there are only 2 qualified continents) is ensured.
with the population rule (which, statistically means a larger pool of good players), it will be franco-prussian war in the final. and prussia will prevail.
真是他妈的灵魂附体了
-- so it proves that once you have reached a certain critical mass, that is, a gene pool large enough to generate the 11-15 players, the contribution of population factor peaks, that size is somewhere between 30-50M. (It was said Brizal can assemble 3 teams, farily enough, with 140-150M people)
-- but Germany deserves the defeat. Odonkor should have replace Scheider in 40". He came on 40 minutes too late.
Now that poor Lehmann is gone, I have only Zidane to root for.
zidane pulled a rooney!
at the end france' fate mirrors its colonial empire brother UK.
so this showed the correlation of final 16th with population is merely a coincidence. what this demostrated is that
1) a large enough gene pool (30M) is need to build one decent football team
2) but smaller country, e.g. portugal, can be lucky and produce great players such C.Ronaldo and Figo.
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