Mourinho defiende a Cristiano: "Yo no haré caer sobre él toda la responsabilidad"
"En mis equipos, cuando ganamos, ganamos todos. Cuando perdemos, pierdo yo. Por eso Cristiano puede estar tranquilo y disfrutar sus vacaciones", dijo.
José Mourinho, nuevo entrenador del Real Madrid, salió en defensa de Cristiano Ronaldo tras las críticas que ha recibido por su comportamiento tras el partido frente a España. También lanzó un dardo al seleccionador, Carlos Queiroz, al sugerir que dejó caer sobre el crack del Madrid todo el peso de la derrota.
"Soy el entrenador del Real Madrid y Cristiano Ronaldo es mi jugador. Tengo el derecho de hacer lo que no hice desde el inicio del Mundial, un simple comentario: en mis equipos, cuando ganamos, ganamos todos. Cuando perdemos, pierdo yo. Por eso Cristiano puede estar tranquilo y disfrutar sus vacaciones, porque la próxima temporada no dejaré que nadie ponga sobre él todas las responsabilidades de un equipo", dijo.
"Los grandes jugadores marcan la diferencia, porque son mejores, pero los equipos son el soporte de todo. Portugal perdió porque España fue mejor y punto", concluyó.
After the Swiss aberration, Spain are back to where they belong: the best team at this World Cup. Their standard of play against Honduras was back to its usual height and had Fernando Torres been a touch sharper, they would have scored five or more. While Argentina and Brazil have been impressive and Portugal thrashed seven past the North Koreans, that Spanish attacking performance was a defining moment of this World Cup. It set down a marker.
What must have been particularly discouraging for the rest was the depth of talent available to Vicente del Bosque. Andres Iniesta was out with a thigh strain but the Spain coach could still afford to use Cesc Fabregas and Juan Mata off the bench.
With Fabio Capello trying to find players capable of freshening up his team for the crucial game with Slovenia it made for a depressing comparison. England’s squad looks desperately thin.
Spain have been the best international side in the world for the last three years – ignore the Fifa ranking of Brazil as No1 – and their first team is formidable. How many English players would make that XI? Ashley Cole for sure, but it is hard to make a case for anyone else.
What was driven home on Monday night, though, was how few English players would have a hope of making the Spain squad, let alone the team. Here’s the Spain squad and here’s the England squad. If you go through it systematically, like-for-like, you’ll see what I mean.
Not a single one of our three goalkeepers would make it. Spain’s No3, Victor Valdes, would easily be England’s No1. One England insider said to me before the tournament that Spain’s seventh-choice goalkeeper would be England’s first choice. He was only half-joking.
Spain’s only weak position is left-back, where Joan Capdevila is capable but not brilliant. Ashley Cole is certainly the superior player. But across the rest of the defence it looks less convincing. Rio Ferdinand and John Terry are not the players they were and Glen Johnson is miles behind Sergio Ramos at right back. You would probably take Terry ahead of Carlos Marchena as a back-up centre back to Carles Puyol and Gerard Pique.
The strength of the Spanish central midfield is ludicrous – Xavi, Iniesta, Xabi Alonso, Fabregas and Sergio Busquets. Steven Gerrard would get in ahead of Javi Martinez but that’s it. None of the English wingers are better than David Silva, Jesus Navas or Mata.
In attack you have the superb pairing of Torres and David Villa to contend with. Then Pedro Rodriguez provides real pace and trickery and can also play out wide. Wayne Rooney would go ahead of Fernando Llorente, the Bilbao target man, but I can’t see any of the other three – Peter Crouch, Jermain Defoe, Emile Heskey – making it.
So out of the 23, if you go on a like-for-like basis, I reckon only four players – A Cole, Terry, Gerrard and Rooney – would make the Spanish squad. That’s the gulf in class Capello has to contend with.
It has become a fixture of NBA draft week in Manhattan: Steve Nash's “Showdown In Chinatown" soccer game.
The charity match, co-staged by Nash and retired American soccer star Claudio Reyna, returns Wednesday night to the turf of Sara D. Roosevelt Park, once again free to the public on the eve of the draft.
Nash and Reyna will be serving as team captains in the 8-on-8 match, which benefits their respective foundations and brings together famous faces from the basketball and soccer worlds.
Rosters are tentative until the game actually starts at 6 p.m., as with any charity event, but the list of expected participants includes two top point guards besides Nash – San Antonio’s Tony Parker and Milwaukee’s Brandon Jennings – as well as a couple of soccer surprises.
Surprise No. 1: Villareal striker and recent ESPN The Magazine cover boy Giuseppe Rossi would have been unavailable for the Showdown had Italy, as widely expected, selected the 23-year-old for its World Cup team. But Rossi, who had the right to represent either Italy or the United States in international play, has put aside the disappointment of the snub to return to the public eye on American soil.
Surprise No. 2: Anthony LaPaglia, perhaps best known in this country for playing Daphne’s raucous brother from England on “Frasier,” was a former professional goalkeeper in his native Australia and will reprise that role in this third edition of the Showdown.
Other scheduled participants include Nash’s Suns teammate Jared Dudley and former teammate Raja Bell, footballers Mathieu Flamini (AC Milan), Juan Pablo Angel (New York Red Bulls) and Simone Motta (Serie A alumnus now at Serie B club Novara in Italy), Red Bulls assistant coach Richie Williams, former soccer pro-turned-journalist Simone Sandri of La Gazzetta dello Sport … and a certain intruder from ESPN.com who doesn’t like to write about himself.
More information on the game, pre-and-post-match activities and Nash’s charitable organization can be found here.
CR9 has broken his drought of almost two years of not finding the back of the net for A Selecção. Exploding onto a defense splitting pass, beating the goalie, albeit slightly fortuitously, and prodding home an acrobatic goal into the wide open net. How does that nursery rhyme "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" go? This is exactly what I thought of when I saw this wonderful goal!
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Honduras is our next rival and despite being the group’s cinderella, they only lost 1-0 to the other “roja” of the group (Chile), which proved there is no easy opponent in a World Cup.
Passing to the next phase now seems a diffifult task for Spain after the dismal display against Switzerland. We cannot lose any points if we want to be with the big boys. World Cup history has proven that unless you are Brazil, Germany or Italy, being considered the heavy favorite into a tournament normally ends up in disaster…let’s prove the theory wrong!!!
Phantoms of underachievement have set again in Spain’s camp, we must send those away and the only way forward in winning, I do not care how, using tiki-taka, the old Furia or “a la italiana” but winning is the only way to redemption!
As Nadal would say…Vamooooooos!!!!!
España domina en nueve de los 11 apartados ofensivos
A dos estadísticas de la perfección atacante. Ése es el lugar donde el repaso a los números ofensivos del Mundial colocan a España. La Roja domina en nueve de los 11 apartados analizados, y en los otros dos ocupa el segundo lugar. En posesión, pases con éxito, regates, centros al área, córners, jugadas en el área rival, jugadas con remate en ese área y pases en profundidad, los hombres de Del Bosque hicieron el mejor partido posible de este torneo el otro día ante Suiza. Y segundo en otros dos: remates totales y aperturas a banda. Además, existe otro dato que desmiente que Vicente haya abandonado la fe en el tiqui-taca: España ha hilvanado la jugada con más pases seguidos del torneo, 32.
En remates y en aperturas a banda, la Roja es sólo superada por Brasil, a la que por cierto le costó ganar su encuentro contra Corea del Norte. Puestos a ser escrupulosos, quizá se debería haber jugado más por las alas...
En los números encontramos claves, como por ejemplo que Argentina no ha necesitado tener el balón mucho para ganar con solvencia sus dos encuentros hasta el momento. 28 minutos de media suman los de Maradona, lejos de los imponentes 41 de los españoles sobre un juego efectivo de poco más de 55. Una barbaridad de dominio que, sorprendentemente, se tradujo en derrota.
Criticism of the Jabulani is borne out by Opta, whose analysis shows an inability to shoot straight dominated the first 16 games.
The Jabulani may not have hit the back of the net very often in this World Cup, but the net of public opinion is closing around it. To the naked eye, the controversial Adidas ball that was introduced for this tournament has been a significant factor in the lack of goals so far, and that perception is supported by statistics taken from the first round of group matches.
Opta figures show that, so far, only 33.44% of shots have been on target. That is down by almost 10% in comparison with the Premier League and Champions League last season, and also the World Cup in 2006. While this may be partly attributable to the small sample size, the fact the difference is so pronounced suggests that it is more than a statistical anomaly. Only four sides – Italy, Japan, Slovenia and Germany – have hit the target with more than half of their shots.
The Germans are at the top of most positive lists, as you would expect of a side who have scored twice as many goals as anyone else. Their passing accuracy of 91.54% is the best of the tournament so far, while a total of 579 passes and a passing accuracy of 80.18% in the final third put them behind only Brazil and Spain.
Once upon a time it was the job of the World Cup to challenge received wisdom and introduce new tactical thinking. This time, the manner of Internazionale's Champions League victory under José Mourinho led to a school of thought that possession was less important than before, because of the increased prioritisation of counterattacking. And although Spain's defeat by Switzerland may reinforce that perception, the general trend of the first week has been to reaffirm that most basic of principles: the teams who pass the ball often and accurately are most likely to succeed.
Arguably the five best sides in the tournament – Germany, Spain, Brazil, Holland and Argentina – are the leading five in terms of passing accuracy, both overall and in the final third. Those teams also provide five of the top six in terms of number of passes; the other is Mexico. The lowest-ranked team are Switzerland, with 233.
As a consequence, the usual suspects top the lists for individual creativity: Robinho, Xavi, Lionel Messi and Wesley Sneijder are almost ubiquitous. Xavi hit the most successful passes in the final third, while Robinho and Messi created the most chances. Brazil's dependence on their full-backs to provide an attacking threat is reflected in the fact that only Xavi and Messi played more successful passes in the final third than Maicon.
Frank Lampard was England's most accurate passer at the business end of the pitch, but his completion percentage of 84 is relatively modest. In football circles, the phrase the English Disease once referred to hooliganism; these days it is more likely to mean the apparent chronic inability to pass the ball to a team-mate, which has driven Fabio Capello to distraction and led to Franz Beckenbauer disdainfully asserting that England "have gone backwards to the bad old times of kick and rush".
The statistics don't necessarily support Beckenbauer's comments. Only 13.88% of England's passes against the USA were long, which makes them the 14th-most direct team of the tournament, a fraction ahead of Brazil, for whom jogo bonito is increasingly little more than romantic rhetoric.
Against the USA, England played 425 passes, which puts them 11th out of 32, with an accuracy of 76.94% (19th out of 32, and below even Greece) and an accuracy in the final third of 66.20% (10th out of 32). Yet despite their occasionally blundering nature, England managed regularly to threaten the USA goal. They managed 23 touches in the opposition penalty area, which puts them sixth on a list headed by Spain, whose total of 49 touches was 17 more than the next best, Chile, and 48 more than Honduras at the bottom of the list. Japan, in an affecting display of minimalist attacking football, beat Cameroon 1-0 despite only having three touches in the opposition's penalty area.
In the first round of matches, Spain had the most passes, the most shots and the most touches in the opposition box. If they keep losing, the voices of those who feel that possession is overrated will be heard. Yet for now, it seems that keeping possession of the Jabulani is the way forward, even if you may not want to shoot with it.
Xavi Hernandez was voted player of the tournament after Spain won the 2008 European Championship. Teammate Sergio Ramos didn't even make the all-tournament squad.
Yet they tied as the two best players at Euro 2008. At least according to a study out of Northwestern University's engineering school, which tried to quantify the performances of soccer players.
The report was published Wednesday in the scientific journal PLoS ONE.
Luis Amaral knows he isn't exactly unbiased when it comes to watching his beloved Portugal. The Northwestern engineering professor wanted to find a way to objectively evaluate players in a sport with few statistics because of the rarity of goals.
"When things are going well, I think they're playing better than they truly are," Amaral, the study's senior author, said in a phone interview Tuesday not long after Portugal tied Ivory Coast 0-0 in a World Cup match. "When they're not going well, I'm probably harsher than I should be."
Amaral and colleagues Jordi Duch and Josh Waitzman did a computer analysis of the play-by-play from each Euro 2008 game. The best players would be the ones who most often touched the ball as part of a sequence that resulted in a shot.
Of the 20 players with the highest scores for the tournament, eight made the all-tournament team. Amaral said that indicates the computer analysis is an accurate tool.
He believes it would be most valuable for scouting lower-level events and comparing players across different leagues and different seasons. Just as statistical analysis has influenced how baseball teams spend their millions, he predicts soccer clubs could follow suit.
"You start to ask, Are these players you're paying this amount of money to actually performing at that level?" Amaral said.
He suggested this type of analysis could also be helpful in basketball, even though the sport, unlike soccer, produces a plethora of stats. Assists are a widely used indicator, but what about the pass that led to the pass that led to the score?
These evaluations could even extend into business, measuring the individual contributions of employees working as a group.
Spain's Ramos may want to show this study to any potential future employers. The Real Madrid defender got off to a rocky start at Euro 2008, getting beat for a goal against Sweden and arguing with his coach at a practice.
But he wound up being a key cog in Spain's run to the championship — and apparently was just as important in his team scoring all-important goals as the much-honored Xavi.
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The top 20 players at Euro 2008 as determined by the computer analysis:
