UPDATE: Netherlands beat Brazil by 2-1… I guess most readers were wrong.
FiveThirtyEight has Brazil with a 61.4% chance of winning, but the question is: what do the intelligent readers of this blog think it’ll be? Vote below:
Oh, and by the way, the game is starting at 10 a.m. EST.
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There’s a choice missing in your poll:
“I couldn’t care less”
#1
Just what i wanted to say.
#1, #2, heh.
It’s been at least two decades since I’ve posted a “me too”. I feel dirty now. <:-(
Gotta love folks who care enough to take the time to tell us they don’t care.
Come on you Orangeses!
Yep, I am firmly in the “who gives a frak” camp.
The best thing about the US being out of the World Cup is that we can go four more years not caring about soccer.
I’ve got a little story for Dvorak to post. You wont find it on digg yet. Really need a place to submit things on here!
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Where’s the option that says “I don’t fucking care”?
Faulty data collecting = faulty data.
It seems most of our readers are not sports fans. Maybe we should do a poll!!
I grew up in St. Louis in the 60’s…soccer was a popular sport, Moved to the south and they had never heard of it. Had to switch to playing football. Had fun playing both really.
But soccer was more physically demanding. Just sayin’.
Melo is throwing this game! The fix is in!
Quite the surprise.
2-1 Netherlands
6:4 ain’t exactly overwhelming odds. No surprise to many who have watched the run-up to the match.
Well done for the Netherlands.
Go Ghana
Go Netherlands!
The game can’t tie, it is an elimination game.
Brazil has some of the hottest girls anywhere; they win every time.
I was wrong.
Tie – Brazil
Tie – Netherlands
Wanna explain the difference?
Actually, don’t bother. I’m seriously too apathetic to check back on this thread.
I was right! I should had bet on this match! bye bye Brazil and hurray to the netherlands!
Jacob, you must be new. The geeks here have little to no interest in sports. The mock what they essentially can’t do and don’t understand, be it football, soccer, tennis, golf, cricket or plain old kick the can and tag.
These are your pathetic, living in your parents basement and sometimes attic, type of intelligent people. You can’t bother them with fun, what are you thinking!
DU jinxed Brazil.
I missed the soccer match. Didn’t bother me at all; it’s a boring sport. From what I can tell the action is among the fans in the stadium (fights mostly), and maybe bookies.
I’m looking forward to NFL and major league baseball instead.
Someone should do some kind of research on possible relationships between a nations’s favorite sports and its most common mindset.
It’s always seemed to me that Americans are very “atomic”. Both football and baseball happen in many small, isolated, short events: a pitch, a bat, a tackle. These two sports are halted and restarted all the time.
In that same vein, Americans love the concept of “days.” Like, “that was a bad day for everyone.” Nobody says something like that in Brazil. We see life as one long continuous thing. We never put that much emphasis on a single day. We focus on the fact, not on a day.
Americans also like to turn someone into a hero or a bane in one day. One person can be revered or scorned for the rest of their life because of what they did on that one day.
Brazilians always complain about how boring baseball is. Nothing interesting happens. The pitcher throws a curve ball. Not impressive. Too quick, too short, too irrelevant. The same when the ball is hit out of the ballpark. It doesn’t hit any specific goal. Snore…
Soccer isn’t made of small, atomic events. Athletes don’t just prepare single moves, each team has a much larger and complex strategy for the entire match. They have to, because the ball is rolling all the time. Soccer is one long, continuous sequence of events. Some matches may have a lot of interruptions, but we don’t like that happens. We say it’s an ugly match. American football can be a little ridiculous to us because it is interrupted all the time, and baseball is absolutely static. Baseball players hardly ever get out of their places. The players spread around a lot more in soccer, each attack or defense is almost completely unpredictable to the viewer.
Bringing other sports into the comparison, I see that Brazilians have a lot more respect for basketball, for example. It’s not very popular, nowhere near as popular as in America, but it’s respected, because it makes sense. Players move around all the time, and they have to be fast. The movements are pleasing to the eye. Brazilians also disdain golf and cricket. Snore… Australian soccer seems to be awesome, but it’s completely unheard of in my part of the world.
Sometimes I think that the typically American “atomic” thinking is dumb, narrow-minded, almost like tunnel vision. However, I think that Americans tend to get a lot more done because of that kind of “atomic” way of thinking. The basis of the atomic approach used in football is to focus on one very specific task and fight tooth and nail to get it done. Fail and you’re scorned. I suspect that soccer thinking encourages people to believe that there is no need to rush, we have 90 minutes to accomplish whatever it is we’ve come to do here, planning carefully is more important, and if we lose, hey, it’s just one match, we have the entire season ahead, no big deal, etc. I think that is reflected in the two nations’ culture.
I am not a scientist, and this is just a fucking blog. I felt like sharing these impressions and maybe getting the ball rolling for some discussion.
I am an American and I don’t like sports. I have never attended a live game of any sort and I have never watched a game of any sort on TV. Snore. I would rather read a book, play a game or work on a project.
#24 #25
You either love sports or you don’t.
I played Little League baseball when I was a kid, though I wasn’t very good at it. I still love baseball, as well as watching basketball (I’m 5’9″, too short to do anything but play guard).
My kid (now an adult) played semi-pro football for awhile, but injured his knee doing it. He’s still into watching the game, more than any other.