EPL Talk » Croatia

England On The Brink Of 2010 World Cup

Simon Tanton — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 12:40:55 +0000

South Africa 2010

Almost twenty years ago England went to Poland knowing that a draw would qualify them for Italia 90. A backs-to-the wall performance and the magnificence of Peter Shilton ensured they had their point and the team then went onto reach the semi-finals of the tournament that arguably saved English football from itself and ultimately elevated it to today’s dizzy heights.

Were it not for the crossbar however that Poland hit in the last minute with the superlative Shilton well beaten, England would have lost that night and not have qualified for Italia 90. There would have been no glorious semi-final defeat, no tears from Gazza and the EPL might never have been born. Yet lady luck was smiling on England that night and here we are some 20 years on with England once again on the brink of the finals of the World Cup. Like Bobby Robson’s team, England remain unbeaten throughout their qualifying campaign but there is unlikely to be a repeat of that night in Chorzow where England had to get a result as their campaign for South Africa draws to a close.

Should England fail on Wednesday they have a second and a third stab at qualification against the Ukraine and Belarus respectively in October although in all likelihood their passage to South Africa next summer will be sealed with those two games to spare.

There’s something about a do-or-die game however that somehow makes it all seem worthwhile. All those weekends where the EPL comes to a grinding halt and all eyes are fixed firmly on the England camp seem to frustrate fans and managers alike but when it all comes down to one night, it serves up a starter that wets our appetite for the main course of the Finals themselves next summer.

In years’ gone by, as well as the nail-biter in Poland, England supporters have endured the catastrophe in Rotterdam in 1993, the miracle of Rome in 1997, David Beckhams finest hour in 2001 although last time around in 2005 it was something of a damp squib as Sven’s men actually qualified for Germany on the back of a Dutch victory over the Czech Republic.

Of course the misery of failing to qualify for Euro 2008 is still relatively fresh in people’s minds and whilst you could argue that England have come on in leaps and bounds since that horror show in 2007 – ironically also against Wednesday’s opponents Croatia – it could be argued that international football is steadily falling down the interest radar. Of course everyone loves the World Up but the whole qualification process? It just seems inconvenient particularly to fans of the Bloated Four although it must be said but when it is their teams that are pretty much decimated by international call ups you can maybe see their point.
There was a time when England games seemed to really matter and they would capture the imagination of the English public in as much as they seemed to unite the football world but now they seem nothing more than a little sideshow than needs to be gotten out of the way before everyone can back to the real deal of the EPL.

With two huge games coming up on September 12th (Man City v Arsenal; Spurs v Man Utd) when the league resumes it is sometimes hard to get too excited about the international scene but come next summer no doubt even England’s biggest critics will be on the bandwagon although it is fair to say that the EPL has become the be all and end all of football in England and sadly that seems to include international football as well.

As far as Capello is concerned, well all he has done really is take the same group of players and taught them how to win again in a not too dissimilar way that one of his predecessors Sven Goran Erickson had England playing. It’s not pretty but it is effective – albeit against mediocre opposition it must be said. Indeed, perhaps one of the biggest reasons for England’s recent winning streak is not necessarily the new manager but the standard of opposition in their group. You can only beat what’s in front of you and England has obviously done that but without really making anyone sit up and take notice. There’s still questions about the left side of midfield, there’s still doubts about Gerrard and Lampard in the same team and whilst those issues have been part and parcel of the England set up for years it seems there’s now doubts about just who is the first choice goalkeeper and just who should partner Rooney up front if there is to be a partner for him at all.

The warm up game against Slovania on Saturday will merely be a taster for the big event on Wednesday with Capello hoping above all to avoid any injuries to his squad so he may play his first team. Looking at the team that faced Poland in 1989 what Capello wouldn’t give for the likes of Shilton, Bryan Robson and Gary Lineker to be lining up for him. Indeed it makes the mouth water doesn’t it? Gerrard and Robson together in the middle of the park? Rooney and Lineker up front? Maybe England would even progress beyond the Quarter Final stage and maybe even…nah, it wouldn’t be the same without a heartbreaking penalty shootout loss would it?

Poland 0-0 England
11 October,1989
Stadion Slaski, Chorzow

Peter Shilton [Derby County]
Gary Stevens [Glasgow Rangers]
Stuart Pearce [Nottingham Forest]
Desmond Walker [Nottingham Forest]
Terence Butcher [Glasgow Rangers]
David Rocastle [Arsenal]
Bryan Robson [Manchester United]
Stephen McMahon [Liverpool]
Christopher Waddle [Marseille]
Peter Beardsley [Liverpool]
Gary Lineker [Tottenham Hotspur]

Chelsea’s Punishment Shows UEFA Is Toothless

Paul Bestall — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 22:00:30 +0000

Now I’m certainly not going to start defending Chelsea’s players or the reactions of certain fans after the final whistle back on May 6th. Yes, the referee had a nightmare, yes Chelsea should have had two penalties at least and yes to some people it was easy to understand the reactions of some of the players after Tom Henning Ovrebo’s performance that night.It doesn’t excuse the behaviour of the players and fans after the game at all.

What I am astounded at is UEFA fining Chelsea £85,000 for failure to control their players and fans. Not because I disagree with it, but because UEFA continually ignore the issue of racism at football matches and issue a stream of pathetic, pointless little fines to teams who allow they’re fans to pollute football with their backward mentality towards non-white players. When you look at Chelsea’s punishment and then consider it in the scheme of failure to control players and fans, you’ll see what I mean.

In UEFA’s little world, racism isn’t an issue that warrants serious attention. They pretend it doesn’t happen and we’re all one big happy footballing family. Two years ago, England Under 21’s were fined £2000 for failure to control thier players after taking exception to Serbia’s players and fans who had racially abused the black members of the England Under 21 team throughout and after their European Championship match in 2007. Serbia were fined £16,500 and allowed to continue in the competition. This is UEFA’s zero tolerance approach to racism, paltry fines and allowing racist idiots to continue to perform.

In 2004, England’s black players were heckled throughout the 90 minutes of a “friendly” against Spain in Madrid at the Bernabeu Stadium. The Spanish FA were fined the crippling amount of £44,500 from a game that generated 4 million pounds. 1% of the revenue that match created for the Spanish F.A . Once again, UEFA showed zero tolerance. That’ll show them won’t it?

Of course some Croatia fans infamously formed a human swastika in 2006 during a game against Italy but were only fined £10,000 even though it was the third racist incident by their fans in 4 years. Once again, UEFA showed zero tolerance.

It astounds me that the UEFA continue to punish clubs and players so leniently and then wonder why incidents still happen in certain countries. When a club receives a bigger fine for showing petulance and anger towards a match official than teams that unfurl racist, anti-muslim or anti-semitic slogans and banners at games then it shows how scared to tackle the issue they really are.

Of course Chelsea didn’t do themselves any favours by their behaviour that night, but does it justify a fine of such a value when compared to far more unsavoury incidents? For UEFA to punish Chelsea so sternly in comparison is an easy decision by UEFA. It’s an easy way out for them as it was so widely publicised around the world but in the scheme of football what causes the game more damage? Racist morons or emotionally charged football fans?

Drogba though is rather lucky in my opinion to have only received a 4 game ban from European competition; though he does have the threat of a further two games that have been suspended if he oversteps the mark again. Boswinga, who rightly apologised after calling the referee a cheat in the Portuguese media, strangely received a 3 match ban. He withdrew his comments as quickly as he had made them and even rang Overbo to apologise, so can feel harshly done by in comparison to Drogba. Michael Ballack meanwhile is quite possibly the luckiest player at Stamford Bridge, as he’s got away scot free for his body checking and pulling of the referee. Perhaps they were impressed with his star jumps?

In UEFA’s mind, swearing at a referee or calling him a cheat is a worse offence than racially abusing someone and that for me is a sad indictment of the governing bodies attitude to the fight against racism in football. Until they get their priorities right and throw teams out of competitions or hit them with seven figure fines, the racists will continue to abuse and divide. Now that is the real disgrace about Chelsea’s fine.

Premier League And FA Threaten To Sue Justin.tv

The Gaffer — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 14:21:09 +0000

The Premier League and Football Association have finally caught up to Justin.tv and are threatening legal action to prevent soccer fans from around the world watching live streaming games, according to the News Of The World newspaper.

However as of this morning, the streams are still available for today’s Bolton against Manchester City derby and record numbers of fans may visit the site for the first time because of the publicity created by the News Of The World article (see screenshot above, taken from Justin.tv this morning).

EPL Talk wrote about Justin.tv in September and reviewed how easy it was to watch the England against Croatia game. Plus we detailed how many channels were available and how many users were viewing the match. The News Of The World conveniently copy and pasted my research and included it in today’s story without attributing the source.

According to the News Of The World, recent stats from Justin.tv include 167,138 hits for the Man United versus West Ham game and 148,063 viewers for the Arsenal against Spurs derby.

In May 2007, the Premier League filed a lawsuit against YouTube because of the game highlights available on that website. But what the YouTube lawsuit and threatened legal action against Justin.tv expose is another issue entirely. There is obviously a huge demand for soccer fans to watch their favorite team online, but instead of creating a solution that generates revenue for the clubs and the league, the league is focusing on persecuting the companies that are illegally streaming the games.

Sure, what Justin.tv and YouTube (and hundreds of other sites) are doing is illegal, but the Premier League is in a continuous cat and mouse game that it’ll never win. Even with NetResult policing the Internet to limit the amount of goal highlights shown on YouTube and other sites, it’s impossible for that organization to win.

The lawsuit against YouTube and the threats of legal action against Justin.tv are merely a drop in the bucket. All the legal action is doing is showing that the Premier League wants to protect the companies who have paid large amounts of money for the Internet rights to the league.

The Premier League and its clubs are missing out on a huge opportunity to provide legal streaming of matches as well as goal highlights in a package that would be available online to football fans around the world. It’s ridiculous to think that in the year 2008 with all of the technology that’s available that soccer fans should be prevented from legally watching their favorite team play week-in, week-out.

By providing a legal alternative to watch any or all of the games, it’ll put most of the illegal streamers out of business. We, as human beings, are accelerating toward a world where most of our movie and TV watching are being done online. The concern at the Premier League is probably that providing all of the games by the Internet will reduce the amount of money that networks will pay for the TV rights, but I don’t believe this would happen. TV, as we know it, will continue to be around for several years. Until TVs become obsolete, the Premier League has a massive opportunity to generate massive amounts of revenue from both TV and Internet rights.

Is Justin.tv The Killer App For Soccer Fans?

The Gaffer — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 07:41:50 +0000

On Wednesday, there was only one TV network in the UK where you could watch the 2010 World Cup qualifying match against Croatia and that was Setanta Sports. Well, at least legally that is.

While only four million people in the UK had access to Setanta’s pay channels yesterday, the remaining England football supporters were on a mission yesterday to find ways to listen to or watch the live match. Their choices were (a) listening to the match commentary on BBC Radio Five Live, (b) skipping the match entirely and watching the highlights later on Freeview, or (c) scouring the internet in the hopes of finding some site that had the game.

While the last option would seem fruitless to many, those England supporters who visited one site Wednesday would have been pleasantly surprised. That site is Justin.tv, a video streaming site that features hundreds of computer users from around the world connected to webcams.

Living in the United States, my only two legal choices of watching the game live were (1) paying $25 to my local cable company to watch the match on pay-per-view, or (2) finding a pub locally that carried the Setanta pub channel and paying a cover charge of $20 to get in. So instead of paying the dosh, I decided to head to Justin.tv to see if the match was available online for free.

Not only was it online for free, but there were more than six separate streams to choose from. One of the users had connected his computer to a Middle East TV signal. While the quality of the TV signal was strong with little to no buffering, the commentary in Arabic was difficult to listen to after a while. No problem on Justin.tv. I simply clicked on the next stream until I found one that satisfied me.

The one that I did settle on was someone’s stream of Setanta Sports UK. The picture quality was better than my television and the audio levels were perfect as the commentary team of Jon Champion and Chris Waddle did well, although I half wished I was listening to the commentary from the international feed, which featured Martin Tyler and Robbie Earle.

I wasn’t alone in enjoying the England against Croatia feed. There were 30,819 other viewers on Justin.tv watching the same feed, and that was just one of the feeds that Justin.tv carried.

It’s not just the Croatia against England match that Justin.tv was featuring either. When I checked, there were more than 100 different streams showing soccer alone. With so many World Cup qualifying matches on TV, there were streams focused on all sorts of different games that afternoon.

Justin.tv features daily streams of soccer games from around the world. At this rate, the website will become the one-stop-shop for soccer fans seeking streams of matches that are unavailable on free-to-air TV stations or priced at ridiculous rates.

While the Premier League has been busy trying to remove video highlights from YouTube and cracking down on P2P providers, the league is quickly losing that battle. Justin.tv, meanwhile, will be a whole new battle as they try to protect the TV rights of companies who have paid large amounts of money to show games live.

Instead of trying to fight the unending and fruitless battle of preventing people from showing live games or highlights online, the Premier League needs to develop its own online product with state-of-the-art streaming quality at an affordable subscription rate. Instead of watching illegal streams that are poor quality, football fans – I believe – would flock to a site where they can watch matches legally with excellent picture quality and behind-the-scenes video content that they can only find from the Premier League. Again, the key is that this needs to be provided at an affordable price.

What do you think of the proposed idea, and what have been your experiences watching streams from Justin.tv? Share your feedback below by clicking the comments link.

England Croatia Video Highlights

The Gaffer — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:30:33 +0000

Here are all five goals from England’s 4-1 victory against Croatia, including Theo Walcott’s hat-trick:

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