2013 - 2014 Football Thread - Page 412

On December 03 2013 02:22 Twisted wrote:


Which is not really a good thing btw.

If a team that solely relies on getting their success from loanees that are gone next season, the league will just drop in value even more because they'll take valuable Champions League spots for example which bring in a shitload of money for Dutch clubs. Ajax has a budget of around €70m and when they can get 20m+ from the CL it's a huge boost financially.

They're not selling out their stadium seats by a long shot, even against top teams, so them getting a lot of reserves from Chelsea is not helping the club themselves because no-one likes them because of it. And it definitely isn't helping the league. If Vitesse for example reaches Champions League with players that are on loan this season, they'll just fail miserably in the next season when they have to build up an entire new team.

Oh and regarding the previous discussion, I guess it has to be a Dutch thing then yeah. This is basically standard knowledge for Dutch football fans haha. Defenders are bad at playing with the ball at their feet so that's why they're defenders :p. I think it's also the total football style where every footballer should be able to fulfill every role on the pitch (apart from goalkeeping obviously). We demand that our defenders are actually good on the ball as well instead of just being big and fast.

And yeah our defenders being bad is kind of an overrated thought imo. We generally don't concede that many goals. We're just overly critical of our defenders. It's usually just the depth of our team and the fact that we haven't been lucky in deciding moments that we haven't won as much as we 'should'.
I mean.. 1974 we were the best team but lost for I dunno what reason exactly. 1978 our best players bailed on the world cup and we hit the post in the final which would result in a win if we got a goal. 1998 we were great as well. We missed 2 penalties during regular time against Brasil in the semi-final afaik and then lost the penalty shoot-out. 2010 we didn't win literally by a toe-length.
With a little more luck we could've won 3 world cups at least and no-one would mention we can never win anything.

Fwiw there's a very good generation of defenders popping up right now.

On December 03 2013 05:27 wingpawn wrote:
Actually, two missed penalties for Holland in regular time happened in EURO 2000 semifinal agianst Italy, not in 1998 against Brazil. (BTW, that game vs Italy was the most one-sided game I've ever seen in which the better playing team lost in the end).

On December 03 2013 02:10 Liquid`Drone wrote:
yeah goalkeeper I can accept more than defender. my impression from playing as a kid was that yeah, to some degree, the worst kid had to be goalkeeper to play. then there were some exceptions who were just really tall at a young age where they'd be alright outfield players also but they excelled at GK which made them want to play that.

But with defenders, that's not my perception from my Norwegian upbringing at all. My biggest football heroes growing up were usually defenders and some of the best players would be playing defense from the very beginning. In fact, from how I remember it, the crappy useless kids were usually strikers, seeing as how that's how they'd do the least amount of harm. Myself, I was a defender when I was good, and I ended up playing as a striker a couple years after I had swapped football practice for computer games and consequently no longer was good.

On December 03 2013 21:12 Pandemona wrote:
Yeah i guess money is 90% factor in this, but surely there needs to be some wise person somewhere saying. Hey little man, your 14, play for Barcelona for 4 years, get the best training their is. Then move on if your not getting play time or whatever.