A couple quickee thoughts (if you weren't burnt out by my tweeting) on Inter Milan's clinical take down of Bayern Munich in the Champions League final, which one again reiterated this is Jose Mourinho's world and we're all just living in it.
* Let's call this finals football 101. Not a lot of space, tactical, cautious. In other words, not exactly the type of game Fox was probably looking for in its first network Saturday afternoon final.
I was watching the match with a couple friends, one a pretty hardcore fan, one very casual. As you could expect the casual fan wasn't to thrilled by Bayern's back-and-forth passing in the first half.
This was an old-school throwback back to the days of defensive soccer, the kind of soccer that probably turned off a lot of would-be American soccer fans through the years.
But hey, the point of the game is to win. Doubt Mourinho cared much about the entertainment value for Americans sitting on their couches Saturday.
And without a transcendent on-the-ball player like Messi, Ronaldo or Messi, how was this game going to capture the imagination? A rasping Wesley Sneijder freekick? Arjen Robben came the closest with his dipping shot that Julio Cesar punched away.
* No real complaints about Fox's presentation. Yeah, would've been nice to see Bobby McMahon on at halftime, even if the time in the studio set was so short he wouldn't have been able to say very much. (The game didn't have very many talking points, honestly.)
Kurt Menefee wasn't a disaster, even if his pronunciation of Bayern was.
Bruce Arena, well, he's not exactly made for live television.
Fox spent most of the non-game segments of the match in commercials anyway. And with most of the commercial time devoted to the new Nike ad, is that a bad thing?
Usually I'm pretty cranky like Phil Musnick. Today, it was just nice to have a big match on network television in HD.
How can I complain when Martin Tyler and Andy Gray are on American network television?
Can't wait to see where the rating falls. If it tops the NHL playoff game, we'll certainly hear plenty about it.
* Thankfully Diego Milito's second goal gave a match a standout highlight talking point. Daniel Van Buyten might need to spend some time hanging out in Wayne Rooney's caravan in the junkyard for a couple months.
Milito rapidly becoming the new Pippo Inzaghi in Serie A. All he does is score goals.
And with two goals on Saturday, should we start the Milito to Manchester City/United rumors now, or just wait until tomorrow morning?
* Javier Zanetti and Esteban Cambiasso proved a point to Diego Maradona today, didn't they? Guess the other 31 teams in South Africa have to be happy he decided the Inter pair weren't good enough for the World Cup. How would any team get through central midfield of Cambiasso and Javier Mascherano? (If Maradona took one thing away from Saturday's match, maybe it won't be the smartest idea of all time to go to war with Martin Demichelis in the middle of the defense.)
The shield these two put in front of the Inter back four completely flummoxed Bayern, which definitely need Frank Ribery to balance the field and stretch out the defense.
* Safe to say Christian Chivu might have the best sports-related metal plate in his head since Don Zimmer.
* Good job by the usually maligned Howard Webb. The ref's whistle wasn't an issue Saturday, something I always appreciate.
* Basically this game boiled down to the fact that Bayern had to work all season, typified by the play of Ivica Olic all season. When he ran into the brick wall that is the classy center back who loves baby Jesus known as Lucio, well, class trumped workrate.
* All four Bayern strikers: Olic, Thomas Muller, Miroslav Klose and Mario Gomez got worked out out of the game. Not exactly their fault since only Robben really seamed to have any eye for going forward or spurning on the attack. Bastian Schweinsteiger and Mark Van Bommel didn't have their best night.
* Isn't it all but inevitable for Mourinho to end up at Real Madrid, the glamor of glamor clubs? At this point what more can he do in club football other than leading Madrid back to the top of the European heap? However, Mourinho + Ronaldo in the same rooming might cause the world to collapse on itself in a pile of hair product.
Then again, the one thing Mourinho could do to trump what's he's already done at Porto, Chelsea and now Inter is probably lead England, yes, England to winning the World Cup. (Or maybe, in a bizarro world, the U.S. Being the man to push soccer past the tipping point in America? That might stoke his ego, wouldn't it?)
All-and-all, a fine straightforward final.
Too bad from an entertainment standpoint it got overshadowed by a Nike commercial. What are the odds?
* Let's call this finals football 101. Not a lot of space, tactical, cautious. In other words, not exactly the type of game Fox was probably looking for in its first network Saturday afternoon final.
I was watching the match with a couple friends, one a pretty hardcore fan, one very casual. As you could expect the casual fan wasn't to thrilled by Bayern's back-and-forth passing in the first half.
This was an old-school throwback back to the days of defensive soccer, the kind of soccer that probably turned off a lot of would-be American soccer fans through the years.
But hey, the point of the game is to win. Doubt Mourinho cared much about the entertainment value for Americans sitting on their couches Saturday.
And without a transcendent on-the-ball player like Messi, Ronaldo or Messi, how was this game going to capture the imagination? A rasping Wesley Sneijder freekick? Arjen Robben came the closest with his dipping shot that Julio Cesar punched away.
* No real complaints about Fox's presentation. Yeah, would've been nice to see Bobby McMahon on at halftime, even if the time in the studio set was so short he wouldn't have been able to say very much. (The game didn't have very many talking points, honestly.)
Kurt Menefee wasn't a disaster, even if his pronunciation of Bayern was.
Bruce Arena, well, he's not exactly made for live television.
Fox spent most of the non-game segments of the match in commercials anyway. And with most of the commercial time devoted to the new Nike ad, is that a bad thing?
Usually I'm pretty cranky like Phil Musnick. Today, it was just nice to have a big match on network television in HD.
How can I complain when Martin Tyler and Andy Gray are on American network television?
Can't wait to see where the rating falls. If it tops the NHL playoff game, we'll certainly hear plenty about it.
* Thankfully Diego Milito's second goal gave a match a standout highlight talking point. Daniel Van Buyten might need to spend some time hanging out in Wayne Rooney's caravan in the junkyard for a couple months.
Milito rapidly becoming the new Pippo Inzaghi in Serie A. All he does is score goals.
And with two goals on Saturday, should we start the Milito to Manchester City/United rumors now, or just wait until tomorrow morning?
* Javier Zanetti and Esteban Cambiasso proved a point to Diego Maradona today, didn't they? Guess the other 31 teams in South Africa have to be happy he decided the Inter pair weren't good enough for the World Cup. How would any team get through central midfield of Cambiasso and Javier Mascherano? (If Maradona took one thing away from Saturday's match, maybe it won't be the smartest idea of all time to go to war with Martin Demichelis in the middle of the defense.)
The shield these two put in front of the Inter back four completely flummoxed Bayern, which definitely need Frank Ribery to balance the field and stretch out the defense.
* Safe to say Christian Chivu might have the best sports-related metal plate in his head since Don Zimmer.
* Good job by the usually maligned Howard Webb. The ref's whistle wasn't an issue Saturday, something I always appreciate.
* Basically this game boiled down to the fact that Bayern had to work all season, typified by the play of Ivica Olic all season. When he ran into the brick wall that is the classy center back who loves baby Jesus known as Lucio, well, class trumped workrate.
* All four Bayern strikers: Olic, Thomas Muller, Miroslav Klose and Mario Gomez got worked out out of the game. Not exactly their fault since only Robben really seamed to have any eye for going forward or spurning on the attack. Bastian Schweinsteiger and Mark Van Bommel didn't have their best night.
* Isn't it all but inevitable for Mourinho to end up at Real Madrid, the glamor of glamor clubs? At this point what more can he do in club football other than leading Madrid back to the top of the European heap? However, Mourinho + Ronaldo in the same rooming might cause the world to collapse on itself in a pile of hair product.
Then again, the one thing Mourinho could do to trump what's he's already done at Porto, Chelsea and now Inter is probably lead England, yes, England to winning the World Cup. (Or maybe, in a bizarro world, the U.S. Being the man to push soccer past the tipping point in America? That might stoke his ego, wouldn't it?)
All-and-all, a fine straightforward final.
Too bad from an entertainment standpoint it got overshadowed by a Nike commercial. What are the odds?
Labels: bayern munich, inter milan, Jose Mourinho, Soccer
Great point about Cambiasso and Zanetti. There's just no way Cambiasso can be sitting at home right now. I think every other team in the WC, including Spain and Brazil, would like to have his services. And Demichelis made this team? Insanity.
I was very disappointed in the play of both Schweinsteiger and Van Bommel. Too many times I saw players, especially Robben, become isolated on the outside with not interior outlet. Maybe I'm just too used to watching Barcelona, but he seemed alone out there the whole time. I don't see any reason why Van Bommel shouldn't have pulled forward some with Robben in posession and helped him. Another option would have been to have one of the forwards withdraw a bit and help out (especially since there were no crosses coming in and they weren't going to beat Lucio and Samuel in the air anyway). The result was Robben was often up against 2 or 3 inter players and was effectively neutralized. There's an arugment that this wouldn't have happened if Ribery had been in the game, but I'm not sure that's true either.
Everyone can blame Dimichelis and Van Buyten, but I think it's the center mids who weren't good enough. They didn't hustle forward and help when they were needed, and Schweinsteiger was painfully lacking in creativity once he got to the final third of the field. To be real competitors in the CL Bayern need a new CM and probably one or two new central defenders.
i used to find Mourinho annoying etc, but i cant believe he has managed to win the Champions League twice now with two very average teams. He has defied the odds who would've called an ageing Inter team at the beginning? The man deserves a lot of respect and he plays honest football. He knows how to get the best out of sometimes a limited team.
mourinho is the best