World Cup 2022 General Tournament Discussion Thread

Qatar changes the rules about drinking late in the day.

FIFA change the rules on armbands very, very late in the day.

A joke that's becoming a worse joke.

The former will be knocked out in the group stages and forgotten about come Christmas.

Is there any way to save the latter?

Harry Maguire starting in a back four no less, ahead of a great ball playing defender like Ben White. Mad call imo.

We were allowed to move on at our own pace. We didn't have other nations finger-wagging at us. Why should we go and do it to other countries? The next World Cup will be in the USA. Will we be lecturing and encouraging boycotts over their gun laws, restrictive abortion rights etc. or will that not matter because they're predominantly white and Christian? The rest of the world sees through western hypocrisy.

Jesus his nose is destroyed, should have been subbed immediately.

But on the other hand, Ben White has been playing all season as a RB. Why switch him to play as a left sided CB, where he has never played for England. When he has played, it's mainly been in a back 5. They are playing a back 4 today.

Maguire always plays as LCB for club & country in both a back 4/back 5 and knows the English system with both.

All those gestures mean feck all anyway IMO. BLM kneeling farce looks like players stretching. Coloured armbands look nice but pointless. To me it is the Facebook generation symptom. Looking like you care until the next trend.

Felt starting TAA and Grealish would of been a better option given how deep the Iranians would defend.

More difficult for the pacey players like Sterling and Saka to make an impact when teams park 11 men behind the ball.

To be honest a lot of it is performance - but I still find that better than the huge trend of just dismissing everything. The former may not be as useful as we'd like, but the latter is actively destructive.

Decent header from Bellingham

1-0

Is the RTE player live feed shockingly bad for anyone else? I'm on fibre ffs and it's struggling to stream at 540p. Just non-stop buffering.

Not sure on that I always feel pretending to try ‘looking busy’ ‘looking like you care’ is the worst.

It is something I hate as well when I feel players are going through the motions on the pitch. Hiding in games etc. Pretending half assed ‘performance’ as you call it drives me mad.

Except that in reality by throwing out the blanket of dismissal over everything from a distance, you're definitely covering some people for whom whatever it is they're doing means a lot to them, and making it harder for people to try to do things in the future by raising this shïtty attitude about any efforts.

There are specific self-serving acts that deserve to be called out specifically, but saying it as a blanket statement of an entire act/spectrum of action, is just such a useless cynical approach to things, that accomplishes absolutely nothing of any good.

Good finish by Saka. Was there a foul in the build up though?

It's coming home etc etc

Can we at least have a ban during live matches on politics for this thread seeing as it's the soccer forum.2 other threads going for that stuff.

This is gonna get pretty bad the more Iran try chase this game. Could be a real rout.

Iran are fairly useless.

What an easy start for England, Iran are so poor.

The BBC pundits should downplay this saying it's just Iran, but watch as they plan out their route to the final already.

Wow almost literally

Iranian goalie had a bad clash of heads with one of his own players, probably broke his nose. Iranian medics fannying about for ages before they took him off

Kenny Cunningham reminds me of that laughing priest from Father Ted.

How many Asian teams will be in the next World Cup ?

It goes in and looks good but it’s a poor choice of finish. Elite finishers go with the left there. Doesn’t look as good, far less margin for error.

That's been Englands problem for too long. They have the mentality of minnows such as ourselves.