Quote:
Originally Posted by DWetzel
If they're a good team, why don't they play good?
This is a reasonable question. A poker player should understand the answer. The sample size is very small. When it's the Spanish league, and the difference in talent between the top two and the rest is just enormous, well then maybe they always win, b. Football is not a game where the better team always wins, or even wins oftenut when it's WC level competition and the difference in talent between #6 and #30 isn't so pronounced, then it's harder to say who's better based on 6 matches.
Historically three nations stand out for having won multiple WCs and otherwise repeatedly performed at a high level in major international competitions - Germany, Brazil and Italy. With Spain having won the last 2 Euro cups and last World cup, maybe it can be added to the list, but its prior history was not so different from that of Mexico - perennial failure to live up to expectations and get out of the group stage.
There are a whole bunch of teams - Greece and Russia and the USA seem typical in this regard - that regularly are difficult to play against and always seem to have the possibility to make a run in a big tournament (with a bit of luck). There are teams like Mexico and Nigeria that always seem to underperform relative to what one thinks is their talent level. Maybe this reflects a bad assessment of their talent level - maybe it is just some combination of bad luck and organizational problems.
Teams, particularly in places like Africa, can be loaded with talent but play terribly. Many countries have unstable coaching situations, corrupt national federations, and inadequate training facilities. How is Mali going to hire a top tier coach? This is why retreads like Javier Clemente wind up coaching in places like Serbia, Cameroon and Libya (all places that field talented teams). You have this poor country with these rockstar players who earn millions and live abroad (let's not kid ourselves) who come home often more because they have to than because they want to (someone like Eto'o or Keita lived in Europe since he was a young adolescent, and in some ways is as much a European as he is anything). A worst case is - in 2010 Togo's team bus was hijacked on its way to an African Cup match and people were killed. Adebayor quit for a while. Nations like the US or England have a completely different situation. They can hire the best coaches, they have great training facilities, they can have a stable developmental situation if they want, they have developmental facilities (in Africa development means - go play for a European club's youth side), etc. Given the same talent level they ought to do better, on average, than teams like Ghana.
When I look at the US side, I see a solid team with a lot of decent players and no stand outs, that consistently is a difficult team to beat and consistently threatens to advance in major competitions. That's a hell of a lot better than it was 20 years ago. With the increasing popularity of soccer in the US, one expects the US to win a WC sometime in the not so distant future, but at the present the invidual technical ability still seems to be a limiting factor. I can't think of a great team that wasn't lead by a great player or two - Maradona, Zidane, Baggio, Xavi/Iniesta, Romario, Ronaldo, Cruyff, Garrincha, Beckenbauer, etc. - and the US simply does not have players like this. That should temper expectations. What happens to those who watch a lot of European club football is they see all these great players - right now it is Messi, Iniesta, Ronaldo, Ribery, Falcao, etc. - and they don't see anybody like that coming out of the US. So the US could make a run, like Greece in the Euro cup, but it's hard to imagine them beating two of Brazil, Germany, Italy, and Spain, plus some hot team like themsleves, and that's what has to be done to win a WC, if you manage to get out of group stage, which even some real good teams don't manage to do.
We know from friendlies that the US can beat teams like Spain and Germany. That's not true for some countries. Whether the US can do it in a major competition with Ozils on the field remains to be seen. So far they have not.