End of an ERA

[mangas21]

never got it bro......maybe spam caught it...let me check

[gcp]

send me your email

Let me know when you have my email address and I'll erase from here.

[Euro2004]

Euro, no way we would/could have taken on Uruguay or Ghana, wishful thinking on your part. They are loaded with youth, talent, and heart while we are loaded with kaka, and I am not referring to the Brazilian #10. You say our NT played great the last couple of games? I musta watched two totally different games than you did. We were defensively superb against Argentina? Messi danced the tango time and again against 4-5 of our superb defensive leventes at a time for God's sake! 2-0 may be superb to you but superb in my book would have meant 0-0 or 0-1 for Greece, and a positive move forward to the round of 16. See, words still matter with me and they should matter to all of us Greeks. No wonder we never escape mediocrity if we consider such performances superb. And 2004 is history, 6 years have gone by so please, lets give it a rest so we can maybe repeat another miracle before they put me 6 feet under?

please tell me you're joking about messi. he was completely owned! he even came out and made excuses for it, saying "the greeks played a dirty game". At the same time you contradict yourself by saying we are incapable of beating the likes of Ghana and Uruguay and yet you wanted us to attack Argentina?

[mangas21]

ok so santos is in and he's made it abundantly clear that he will "do things his way" and saying quite unambiguously that he will a adopt a different style....

what do you all think that means?

[mangas21]

INTERESTING ARTICLE, JUST ONE MANS OPINION - AND WE ALL KNOW HINDSIGHT IS 20/20....BUT INTERESTING POINTS NONETHLESS....

Giase: (STAR LEDGER) Coaching, or lack of it, cost Brazil, Argentina in World Cup

Okay, how many soccer fans out there are really surprised that Brazil and Argentina crashed out of the World Cup in the quarterfinals?

Are Brazil and Argentina any less talented than their teams in the recent past? Not at all, and you can even make a case the 2010 versions are as good or better than they have been in a decade.

So what happened?

Quite simply, it was the coaching. Or, to be honest, the lack of it.

Diego Maradona and Dunga were great players. In Maradona

[zenon]

I agree Messi was shackled against Greece. It was only towards the end that argentina had more chances because total defence takes it out of players.

Greece should have put pressure on the argentinian defence and made them think more about more then trying to score a goal.

This is what I hope Santos will bring to the side, a more balanced team.

With Otto I really feel they would play this defensive football even if they played New Zealand.

[athinaios]

I'm looking at this Uruguay team playing in the quarterfinals and I'm happy they're there. A country of 3.5 million showing the big boys that a small country can indeed compete.

I know that some teams have more talent and star players, but I couldn't understand why Greece couldn't string 3 passes together for most of the games in the last several years!

[gcp]

Euro, if you read closely you'll see that I'm not at all contradicting myself. I said in previous posts that Otto's strategy & tactics in the Argentina game were exactly what Greece needed....and lots of luck i.e. hold on for dear life and score an opportunistic goal which we almost did btw. But we still would have lost because we didn't have the tools to keep the likes of Tevez from scoring. Orgosan thn amina mas!! No matter what, Argentina knows one way of playing and that's attacking football. They proved it with everyone they played. Maradona calls it "football that people want to see" but as Mangas pointed out he was an attacker with a one track mind and incapable of adjusting the flow of the team to defense when needed.

Look, it comes down to one thing, we didn’t have the tools necessary to get the job done so it was very justified that we were knocked out so quickly and so convincingly. International football runs in deferent speeds and the Greek league and its home grown players just can’t keep up and will not keep up without major changes. True enough Messi was owned but not by us.

And true enough Dunga and Maradona both have mindsets and proved to be non-competent coaches who could not help their teams overcome real-time obstacles when needed.

[thrylos]

People need to be realistic....

No faulting Otto for the tactics against Argentina.

Faulting Otto fro the tactics against South Korea.

[Clover22]

People need to be realistic....

No faulting Otto for the tactics against Argentina.

Faulting Otto fro the tactics against South Korea.

You're the one who isn't being realistic. The reality is we lost 2-0 to Argentina because of Ottos "tactics". You can't just throw 7 or 8 defenders into the game then hope for the best. If we had more attackers then we would have seen more action on the opposite side of the field: more goal scoring chances plus more possesion of the ball. THAT would have been much more difficult for Argentina to score. Just putting up a wall doesn't work, because they just kept hammering away until they finally found the space to score. You can't get a positive result with negative tactics; that makes no sense. Ottos old, fat, lazy, overpaid ideas didn't cut it.

[Clover22]

Euro, if you read closely you'll see that I'm not at all contradicting myself. I said in previous posts that Otto's strategy & tactics in the Argentina game were exactly what Greece needed....and lots of luck i.e. hold on for dear life and score an opportunistic goal which we almost did btw. But we still would have lost because we didn't have the tools to keep the likes of Tevez from scoring. Orgosan thn amina mas!! No matter what, Argentina knows one way of playing and that's attacking football. They proved it with everyone they played. Maradona calls it "football that people want to see" but as Mangas pointed out he was an attacker with a one track mind and incapable of adjusting the flow of the team to defense when needed.

Look, it comes down to one thing, we didn’t have the tools necessary to get the job done so it was very justified that we were knocked out so quickly and so convincingly. International football runs in deferent speeds and the Greek league and its home grown players just can’t keep up and will not keep up without major changes. True enough Messi was owned but not by us.

And true enough Dunga and Maradona both have mindsets and proved to be non-competent coaches who could not help their teams overcome real-time obstacles when needed.

Absolute nonsense. We didn't have the tools to prevent Tevez from scoring? How about Moras, Papastatopoulos, Spyro, Kyriakos. How about those tools? How about the fact that our defense is better than theirs? How about the fact that he could have played Gekas along with Samaras up front? And Salpi? Does Argentina have this unbelievable, incredible defense that no team in the world can penetrate? What do you think they are gods or something?

Keep up with the negative belief system; you'll just be more surprised by the results the NT will have in the coming months/years.

[gcp]

Clover, I'll tell you what’s absolute nonsense, you comparing their defense with ours :LOL: The game pitted their offense against our defense and they sunk 2 golakia vathia ston popo mas. Can GNT get better? I hope so, because I don't see how they can get much worst.......now go outside and play, you're bothering me kid.

BTW, I truly hope our NT does get better, to the point that it wins the next Euro and WC, but I won't be holding my breath. And since I plan to be in Brazil in 2014, theou thelontos, I sincerely hope I am pleasantly surprised

:gr:

[Euro2004]

guys chill out, we're only talking opinions.

i have to disagree with both of you. i agree with gcp that we didn't have the tools, but taking into account what we do have i firmly believe that we could have qualified if we approached the first game like we did from the moment Keita got sent off for Nigeria. In my opinion, taking into account the style and level of players we have at our disposal, we were superb against Argentina. We deserved a draw in my opinion and if Samaras had scored that sitter the world would have proclaimed that the Greece of euro2004 was back.

Messi was handled. That isn't just my opinion, it was the Argentinians' opinion too, because when they asked why he was "off" in that game he said "the greeks played a dirty game". Anyone that saw that game knows that wasn't the case. It's just that Torosidis was superb in not allowing him to run down the left wing. By showing him inside he forced Messi to try and take on Papastathopoulos, and that's where he was dealt with. Messi only came into the game and hit the post after they took the lead and we opened up which meant that Papastahopoulos stopped man-marking him. Up until it was 0-0 Messi was dealt with.

But those last 10 mins proved we couldn't play an open game against them Clover22. We have to use the attributes we have. We're a big, strong team with limited athleticism and pace. By playing open you allow players to become isolated. Can you imagine Messi isolating and running at Kyrgiakos, or Aguero running at Moras? We can't play like that. We can be more open than we now if the team selection was better, but even then our best hope of success would be to be defensive. Like i said before, name me one team in recent memory that has shocked the world (i.e. an unfancied team) by winning a major trophy with attacking football. I bet you can't. Someone else used an analogy that stuck to mind and I've used it ever since (in fact i may have read it here somewhere) : imagine this from a boxing perspective. If you're a good figher, nothing special, just "good" and you're fighting a world class knock out specialist, how do you approach the fight? If he's more powerful than you and you go out swinging, not placing enough emphasis on keeping your defence tight, you will get knocked out. The only way to overcome him is to avoid getting hit with a big shot. That does apply and will always apply to Greece

[gcp]

And if my giagia had ahamna thatan o papous mou ;)

Come on guys lets forget the what ifs, PLEASE! It is what it is so lets concentrate on what it will be or else we are wasting our time and are being disillusioned into added heartache.

Onto Uruguay/Germany come on Uruguay :gr: ...I know, not the same but they do have almost the same colors as ours

[gcp]

Well now, it looks like I've done it once again! OctaPaul's picked the outcome of every single game correctly and I've not. So, I guess openly I'll support Holland because deep down I want them to loose and since I don't want to jinx Spain, GO Holland, you orange fruits you :whistle:

[Clover22]

guys chill out, we're only talking opinions.

i have to disagree with both of you. i agree with gcp that we didn't have the tools, but taking into account what we do have i firmly believe that we could have qualified if we approached the first game like we did from the moment Keita got sent off for Nigeria. In my opinion, taking into account the style and level of players we have at our disposal, we were superb against Argentina. We deserved a draw in my opinion and if Samaras had scored that sitter the world would have proclaimed that the Greece of euro2004 was back.

Messi was handled. That isn't just my opinion, it was the Argentinians' opinion too, because when they asked why he was "off" in that game he said "the greeks played a dirty game". Anyone that saw that game knows that wasn't the case. It's just that Torosidis was superb in not allowing him to run down the left wing. By showing him inside he forced Messi to try and take on Papastathopoulos, and that's where he was dealt with. Messi only came into the game and hit the post after they took the lead and we opened up which meant that Papastahopoulos stopped man-marking him. Up until it was 0-0 Messi was dealt with.

But those last 10 mins proved we couldn't play an open game against them Clover22. We have to use the attributes we have. We're a big, strong team with limited athleticism and pace. By playing open you allow players to become isolated. Can you imagine Messi isolating and running at Kyrgiakos, or Aguero running at Moras? We can't play like that. We can be more open than we now if the team selection was better, but even then our best hope of success would be to be defensive. Like i said before, name me one team in recent memory that has shocked the world (i.e. an unfancied team) by winning a major trophy with attacking football. I bet you can't. Someone else used an analogy that stuck to mind and I've used it ever since (in fact i may have read it here somewhere) : imagine this from a boxing perspective. If you're a good figher, nothing special, just "good" and you're fighting a world class knock out specialist, how do you approach the fight? If he's more powerful than you and you go out swinging, not placing enough emphasis on keeping your defence tight, you will get knocked out. The only way to overcome him is to avoid getting hit with a big shot. That does apply and will always apply to Greece

I agree about Messi and the fact that the our players actually played very well, but the last 10 minutes didn't prove a damn thing about playing an open game since he didn't even use the players to try!

Being defensive will always apply to the Greek NT? None of us really know that. I think we'll see something quite different starting as soon as August 11th!