Every team has played its first match, so it’s time to identify the most potent draught of goal-scoring elixir to date. (People actually talk that way, you know. It’s just verisimilitude from me.) Rather than staging a vote, I’m going to declare a winner from On High. But please, feel free to name your own choice in the comments. The nominees are. . .
David Villa v. Russia
Wesley Sneijder v. Italy
Zlatan Ibrahimovic v. Greece
And the winner is…Wesley Sneijder. Zlatan’s strike was sensational, but the team build-up, the fantastic header from Kuyt, and the tight-angle stab of the shot put Sneijder’s goal in a class by itself. In any case, if the next round of games produces three goals as good as these, I don’t think we’ll have anything to complain about.
Read More: David Villa, Euro 2008, Zlatan Ibrahimović
by Brian Phillips · June 11, 2008
Can’t we have two separate categories, one for best team goal and one for best piece of individual brilliance? Zlatan’s strike was absolutely incredible, though the Dutch second was clearly a better overall goal.
But if we have no separation, I too will vote for the Sneijder goal, if only because it was so pretty and yet it featured Dirk Kuyt’s face. Tough to pull off.
Yeah it would be Wesley Sneijder for me too.With the build up and especially the little gap in between the defender and Buffon’s gloves.
Frankly speaking I didn’t find Villa’s goal brilliant enough in comparison to the other two nominees.
Hope to see something even better in the next round of matches.
For me it’s Ibrahimovic. The Dutch goal was excellent, for sure, especially the pin point ball from VB from the left, and Sneijder’s shot was first rate but Buffon gave him the near post by stepping out and it was a tear away break with as many if not more attackers than defenders, which means it should be goal and those look greater than they are difficult.
The Ibrahimovic shot came from nowhere and it won the game too.
Sneijder’s was the only goal that got me I out my seat fist-pumping like some ‘roid-dropping maniac…Ibs was more aesthetically pleasing, highlight reel stuff. These days I’m more about goals in their context…
I also thought Fabregas’ goal was fantastic, with its sequence of beautiful lobbed flick, text book volley, brilliant save and flying header.
@A,Fabregas was possibly offside as I’ve heard as I wasn’t able to watch the game and still haven’t seen the clips from an angle.
It doesn’t stop people from scoring these days RM_rocks.
Well yeah but it does question the authenticity of it being a great goal.Just like Maradona’s “hand of god” which possibly is remembered ONLY for the wrong reasons and not for being a “great” goal.
Ahh, but this goes back to aspect of great goals in their context. Maradona always says with his tongue firmly in cheek that the hand goal was the greatest goal he ever scored.
He says that mainly because there was an element of ‘divine intervention’ involved.
I agree that the context of the goals being compared are totally totally different but its the idea of goals that should have been disallowed and not counted as great goals.
I saw the match and I can’t remember seeing any conclusive footage to show either with the Fabregas goal.
…but I take your point.
Thank you.
I thought Fabregas’ chip was maybe the *pass* of the tournament so far, but the resulting goal was about average. While the simple, brutal beauty of Zlatan’s goal appeals (here, you take it, I’m just going to step over here, now could you give it back please, THANK YOU VERY MUCH), the WS goal beats it on sheer real estate.
R_r, I definitely agree that Villa’s goal was a distant third to Ibra’s and Sneijder’s (which properly speaking belonged not so much to Sneijder as to The Historical Spirit of Dutch Football). But Villa’s feint-left, slash-right move to get around the defender, combined with the brilliant timing of the shot—hesitating just long enough to draw Akinfeev out, then firing in the ball just before the wave of defenders reached him—made his more exciting than Fabregas’s for me. He probably got some unconscious bonus points for netting the hat trick, too.
Zach, I can’t tell you how much I’d love to do a roundup of the best passes of the tournament. Sadly, the people who make highlight videos don’t seem to share my vision. I think Fabregas’s chip and Iniesta’s jazzy poke for Villa’s second would probably be on my list.
Did anyone see the Portugal match today? I heard a glowing report of Ronaldo’s goal but haven’t yet seen it for myself.
Yeah I managed to see the goal which Ronaldo scored.Not fit enough for this category though but was a shot good enough to beat Czech and especially with a defender closing in and on the tip of the box to slot the ball in the left hand corner of the goal.Good performance by Portugal overall.
I saw it. It was a technically flawless goal, what they call in the Premiership “clinical finishing.” One side footed swipe on the pass…looked like a computer game. But goal of the tournament it was not.
The ‘chip’ was actually by Villa, not Fabregas.
Fabregas is first time slide rule pass to Villa for the latter’s famous goal was a magic assist.
Sneijders was the best “hands down”
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it was for Arjen Robben to score that goal tonight. A new leader, I think.
Henry’s goal was classy too. Like Robben’s, it was the only way to score from that position.
Wasn’t Henry offside? I can’t remember anyone on the TV coverage I saw mention it but I could swear he was.
Anyway, and to add to the comments above on Fabregas’ goal, I think the case could be made for it being morally onside – the margin for many offside calls is so fine, and many such calls are incorrectly (if understanably, given how difficult it is to determine) given offside; it would be a shame not to acknowledge the quality of the goal because Henry was leaning forward slightly.
Um, all of which is another way of saying “I agree, A.”.
Well the benefit of the doubt is ‘supposed’ to go to the attacker but hardly ever does. The benefit of the doubt in the vast majority of close calls seem to go to the status quo.
And oh yes, Fredorrarci, don’t get me started on [i]morally[/i] on and off sides.
From where I sit, the officials in this tournament seem to be favouring the defending team in borderline situations, though I don’t know why, as doing so goes against everything that Platini and the current administration have said on the subject. The Guerriero goal is a relative anomaly for having been given, while the Toni goal that was disallowed against Romania is more typical of the current zeitgeist.
They also clearly have been instructed to apply a significantly more stringent set of criteria when giving second yellow cards, which also doesn’t make much sense to me.
Looking at the Henry goal again, I don’t think he was offside. Video evidence to follow.
Ursus, I agree about the second-yellow-card issue. On ESPN here Julie Foudy likes to praise officials for showing “restraint” after bad tackles, and Tommy Smyth takes a hard-line rules-are-rules position and argues with her. I agree with Tommy, but the whole thing is surreal.
Check out Henry around the ten-second mark on the video here.
Brian, I agree, it was level at worst.
Agreeing with Tommy Smyth about anything is by definition surreal.
There was an occasion in one of the recent matches in which the ref (it may have been Fandel in France/Holland, but I’m not sure) saw a bad foul, reached into his pocket, and only then realised that he had already booked the transgressor. As a result, he never lifted the card from his pocket.
Ursus, I believe you are referring to the Croatia/Austria match. Early in the game the ref pulled a yellow card on an
Austrian player for touching a Croatian in the box. It was a very ticky-tacky call. A few minutes later the same Austrian manhandled some poor Croatian, threw him to the ground. The ref saw it, reached for his card, realized who the offending player was (and what it would mean for the rest of the game) and quietly put the card back in his pocket.
Ironically this was the play in which Julie Foudy and Tommy Smyth were discussing. Foudy said it was a “good no-call” because of the impact it would have had on the rest of the game. Smyth would have none of that, saying it isn’t the ref’s job to ponder the context of the game. The refs job is to enforce the rules, and if the Austrian deserved a yellow card, then he deserved a yellow card, the context of the game be damned. The Austrian put the ref in the difficult position of deciding the context of the game no matter what call he made; therefore he should have enforced the rules and ousted the offending Austrian from the game. Julie Foudy looked foolish. I agree with Smyth.
Sorry, but it wasn’t Pogatetz (though it may have happened then, too), it was either in France-Holland or one of yesterday’s matches.
FWIW, I thought Pogatetz committed at least three yellow card offences in the first 15 minutes against Croatia, and that the “throwing to the ground” incident could have been a straight red.
So I guess that the broken clock principle applies to Smyth after all.
It did happen with Pogatetz—seems like it’s happened two or three times throughout the tournament. An American studio commentator (I can’t remember which one) actually described a referee’s reaching for the card and then putting it back by saying, “he bottled it at the last moment.” Only he seemed to mean that as a compliment.
We’re making strides in our appreciation of soccer (it’s been great having all the games on ESPN2) but our use of British slang still needs some work.
Without wanting to turn this into one of those Italian Monday night shows where they argue about this type of thing for an hour and a half, I still maintain that Henry was just – but just – offside. His torso is a few inches further forward than the defender’s. But then maybe the defender’s foot was closer to goal…oh, I don’t know anymore.
“don’t get me started on morally on and off sides.”
Ah, now I’m curious, A. I hereby request that you indeed get started on morally on and offsides.
I don’t think the failure to give the benefit of the doubt to attackers or the second-yellow-card reluctance are unique to this competition. Perhaps it’s more pronounced in a major tournament, the higher stakes making refs more conservative in their decisions. Maybe they also have in mind the lambasting Ivanov got after correctly applying the rules of the game in the Holland-Portugal match two years ago (weren’t all the red cards in that game for two bookable offences?).
I agree that the benefit of the doubt does not often go to the attacker, in all competitions, despite the encouragement of the governing bodies who have been drumming up this regulation for well over a decade now. I think it has to do with the nature of justice in the human psyche: if there’s doubt you maintain the status quo, and the flags keep going up.
As to things moral, the RVN goal against Italy should have been flagged, I don’t care what the rules are. It was lousy of the officials to now apply the rules so strictly, when it has never ever in any competition been applied before. And don’t tell me that this situation simply hasn’t come up before. If the linesman genuinely felt that Panucci was trying to gain an advantage for his team’s offside trap ( he clearly wasn’t doing that), then okay, but I think the linesman just flagged it on the letter of the law.
I take your point on the van Nistelrooy goal. Panucci certainly was not faking it to play offside. Morally, it shouldn’t have counted.
Practically, however, I kind of understand why the interpretation exists and why it was applied. There are so many factors that go into an offside decision, and so little time in which to process them, that to expect a linesman to also consider whether a player lying off the field is genuinely injured is surely unreasonable.
Shouldn’t the powers-that-be do a better job of broadcasting such amendments to the interpretations of the rules? Did anyone outside of officialdom know about this one before this incident?
Quite a few people in Italy knew of the interpretation because the situation had ocurred in a Roma-Fiorentina match in 2007.
Though in that case, the referee annulled the goal (scored by Mancini with Pazzini in the “Panucci role”), only to be publicly reprimanded two days later by Collina (who is now in charge of the Serie A referees), who noted that the goal should have been given in accordance with the “new” interpretation.
All of this was discussed on Italian television and radio during half time of the Italy/Holland match, but it appears that rational analysis at that point was largely limited to Italy, as I understand that Anglophone “pundits” were insisting that the RvN was offside even after being given the interpretation.
The situation also came up in a Serie C1 match earlier this year, but no one outside of the immediate area remembered that until the Holland/Italy incident.
What’s shocking to me is that this seldom-encountered, largely insignificant wrinkle in the rules has become the talking point of the tournament. The situation almost never happens, and most Italy fans would agree that it didn’t even change the course of the match in which it did happen (of course it’s impossible to say that for sure, but Holland were already laying waste to Italy at that point), so why is it still coming up on virtually every match broadcast and halftime show?
I’m not complaining, exactly, as the complete innocence displayed by some of the expert pundits of even the basics of the offside rule has been enormously fun to watch. Andy Townsend on ITV isn’t the only commentator who has disputed the decision by noting that “Panucci wasn’t interfering with play.” Panucci was a defender!
Oh, Townsend has been hilarious this past week. The Spain-Sweden ‘offside’ tirade mentioned in that link was priceless (he brought it up again later that evening for Russia’s goal against Greece).
In fact he was backed up by Sam Allardyce, who even said that he will try to expolit this ‘loophole’ this coming season, should he get a job. I so hope he does.
This – http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/mar/23/football.comment3 – from the Observer a few months back is a good article summing up the general (wilful?) ignorance of the offside law in the British media.
And I don’t remember the Roma-Fiorentina incident – slap on the wrist for me. But it backs up my point – from your telling, Ursus, it seems that no-one knew about this interpretation until Collina brought it up, though it was apparently already four years old by then.