ponsaelius

5 man defence with a load of PL flops up front. Disgrace to the heritage this.

Dutch need to play somebody interesting. Is Depay not fit? Simons could be exciting too. At the moment very dull set up.

Just looked at this Dutch keepers Wikipedia page. Bloody hell. 28 years of age with only 32 Eredivisie and 8 Serie B appearances.

Of course. But I only ever watch it live once every two years when a major tournament comes round. And amazingly the service never gets any better.

Never ceases to amaze me how bad ITV player is.

There's going to be a massive gap between tickets sold and attendances. Loads of people will have bought tickets but ultimately not have been able to afford to go, while loads of locals will probably simply not bother.

Iranians are not Arabs

Watching UEFA footy you get used to the fact that travelling is generally minimal, pitches are always good, climate and altitude broadly the same. Even the microstates basically have top notch facilities and organisation. It's a very controlled environment that produces pretty steady and dependable results despite the high quality throughout. With other continents there are lots of things that are equalisers - and thats obviously true in Asia. Huge amounts of travelling for the players in the bigger sides (most of Japan's squad play abroad for example), vastly different climates, poor pitches, atrocious referees. It's the same in the likes of CONCACAF. While the USA can raise their game in a world cup when the facilities are top notch - they can get dragged right down if they're not on it and end up not qualifying in the first place. As with Qatar today look at Panama in 2018 and wonder how on earth they got there ahead of the US. I'm not a betting man but I wouldn't go anywhere near betting on a lot of international football. Too many chaos factor involved to be sure.

You'll get games in the AFC where the likes of Vietnam and Thailand will match up reasonably well against the likes of Korea and Japan and be competitive. But they'd get obliterated far worse than Qatar did today if you put them in a World Cup against physical and technical South American/European teams (whereas Japan/Korea have often matched up reasonably well and give a strong account). It's always been a bit of a strange continent for results like that.

Then the hosts UAE 4-0 in the semis and then Japan 3-1 in the final. Clearly in the AFC they are not outmatched physically and are able to impose themselves on games - with club type cohesion providing an equaliser. In fact they may actually have some kind of physical advantage in those games considering the origin of some of their players. Today they were just completely outgunned physically from the off. That further enforced the technical gulf (no pun intended) between the teams.

Kick off times here would have been awful. It's a no from me.

Might be keen to watch. Off tomorrow and at a bit of a loose end. Other plan was just to watch at home.

The empty seats are unsurprising like. Citizens of these smaller gulf states are possibly the biggest spoilt brats on earth. Not really their fault - just a product of their society where everything is on a plate for them their whole lives. Throw in that this is the only ground without a metro station and they've clearly quite literally fucked off to beat the traffic.

Hosts being crap was one of the many things that made 2010 rubbish. Gonna need some surrogates to perform the Ghana role for the Middle East. Maybe Morocco.

Qatar are rubbish but they've been completely physically overwhelmed and overawed from minute one. Reckon weirdly Ecuador might have been one of the worst teams you could play out of the block if you're trying to settle into a passing game and have a keeper who is a total bombscare.

Qataris should have definitely drafted some huge Eastern European keepers into that Aspire academy of theirs.

Was offside like. It hasn't helped that the new system is supposed to significantly reduce VAR timescales and need for replays. Made it look like they were just hiding the decision.

Howay mate have you watched football before? The goalkeeper is in front.

Seriously need another replay mind.

Belgium's squad couldn't be any more 'last dance' if they tried like.

It's a superb documentary. Best footy one since Kapadia's Maradona film. BBC have got a few on iPlayer. The Cameroon 1990 one is also a DAZN production and worth a watch. The Messi one is a BBC job but also decent I thought.

The atmosphere at a lot of games will definitely be weird I think. Prohibitive cost of travel/accomodation will make it more middle class than usual. Crowds will be boosted by a lot of expats who live and work in the gulf, with a lot of neutralsl football fans in amongst that. That said, a lot of the same was said beforehand about Russia but this was from a UK/Euro centric perspective. What actually happened was you still had loads of Mexicans, South Americans etc travelling who didn't see what all of the fuss was about. Argentina - Saudi Arabia on Tuesday morning will be interesting from an atmosphere perspective. That's in the main stadium and both of those are expected to have very big followings. If it's crap then you probably can write off any hope of the usual colour.

That Linfield result is a bit of a shocker but it is just a friendly and they've had some decent results over the last few years in competitive games. Winning the Asian Cup and getting to the semis of the Gold Cup. They weren't totally battered in the Copa America either the other year with a draw and a couple of narrow defeats. Think the biggest likelihood is they'll simply be physically overwhelmed by all three teams in the group. Unless they're sufficiently juiced up like the Russians were.

For what it's worth that account has seemingly already been proved in the past to be a disinformation account with geopolitical motives. Not uncommon between the gulf states. That being said, it's certainly hard to deflect an accusation like that when the very awarding of the tournament is based on corruption and money being no object.

The cross field passes are unreal but the most shocking thing to me is still the ease to which Trippier beings them down. I keep expecting them to end up out of play. It's very hard getting used to having good players.