No I think they can pick him but they arenât. He was replaced so he can still be picked:
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I hope Argentina do it for the Irish diaspora like Mac Allister, OâTamendi, OâMessi,
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You canât teach thick as they say.
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I was driving the car in to little ilsand for the NCT this morning. 2FM was on the radio, 2 women and a man talking about the world cup
MAN: âI was SOOOOO disappointed Morocco lost the other nightâ
WOMAN 1 or 2: " i KNOOOOOOOOW, did you like identify with Morocco being Irish"
MAN: " I REAAAALLLY actually did"
WOMAN 1 or 2: âOH MY GOD, ME TOOOOâ
MAN: âI donât think Iâll watch the final now, itâs just a kick around between France and Argentinaâ
I just switched off the radio for fear thereâd be similar shit on another station.
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I was listening this morning to Today FM on my way to work, and a woman had a panic attack over being asked to spell âUruguayâ. She hadnât a clue where to start
U wouldnât know where to start
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Itâs day 27 of the World Cup.
Today Gianni Infantino feels like a hard as nails Belfast cabbie with an IRA past, a razor sharp wit and a machine gun laugh. Heâll give you a Troubles tour.
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Donât have a sub to unlock but tis a shame all the same everything/stadiums etc are so generic now
The 20-year plateau of the FIFA World Cup⢠aesthetic (or why World Cups all now look the same)
Dec 1, 2022
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The past four World Cups have spanned 12 years, visited four continents and cost their hosts somewhere in the ballpark of $250billion.
Despite all that, thereâs one big problem: every World Cup now looks the same.
Letâs take one of the most striking, evergreen World Cup scenarios; namely, Argentina playing a team in green shirts. Here they are playing West Germany (top left, 1986), Cameroon (top right, 1990), Nigeria (bottom left, 1994) and Nigeria again (2002):
Even as mere mid-game freeze-frames, these four scenes (Argentina, annoyingly, managed to avoid a green-shirted team in 1998) perfectly capture the self-contained, unmistakable looks (plural) of the pre-millennium World Cups. In spite of Fujifilmâs stranglehold over the pitchside advertising, itâs the tone, the broadcasting imperfection, the light and detail that mark each one out as belonging to their mini-era.
Next, letâs examine four more glimpses of Argentina toiling against men in green: against Mexico (top left, 2006), Nigeria (top right, 2014), Nigeria yet again (bottom left, 2018) and Mexico once more (2022). While the commercial partners have drifted steadily from tangible electronics to carbon-burning megalomania, the uniformity of what we see is overwhelming.
Hereâs another of what should be an eye-catching World Cup sight: Brazilâs yellow against a team in red. The top row (vs Spain in 1978 and 1986 and Denmark in 1998) is wildly, gloriously diverse.
The bottom row (vs North Korea in 2010, Switzerland in 2018 and 2022) could, at a glance, quite easily be the same tournament.
When, how and why did this happen? Itâs time to traverse the 20-year plateau of the FIFA World Cup⢠aesthetic.
The first half of the World Cupâs colour-TV era was immune from any FIFA-masterminded desire to âpresentâ football in any particular way for a global audience. They simply did what World Cups should broadly, philosophically do: provide a snapshot of elite-level football at that very point in time.
Between the 1960s and 1990s, the game developed at such a rapid pace â law changes, kit designs, stadium architecture, the fundamental equipment, even footballers themselves â that it would have been impossible to contain footballâs overall visual style, let alone standardise it. But, crucially, there has been a post-millennium petering-out of this evolution, certainly in a visual sense.
Where do we pinpoint the moment World Cup style flatlined? USA â94 was certainly the last truly unique-looking tournament. The 1998 World Cup was held in Europe, the epicentre for the global homogenisation of football that is now well underway. Perhaps the 2002 tournament in Japan and South Korea, with its venues that we remain obliged to describe as âspace-ageâ, really represents the beginning of this phenomenon.
And it is a phenomenon that pervades even the finest World Cup details, let alone the overarching themes. Even the smaller pieces of iconography (the official balls, the national team kits, the boots, Herve Renardâs entire existence) seem to have stalled. Weâll get on to the most likely reason for that later.
For all the rhetoric of âtaking the game around the worldâ â the near-bulletproof argument by Qatarâs most invested apologists for the location of the 2022 tournament â these World Cups, at least in their televisual context, are hosted by FIFA. If you have ever watched a World Cup draw, or press conference, or opening ceremony, you will have absorbed just how perfectly FIFA have mastered the art of grand blandness; the spinning out of inherently dramatic, symbolic football moments into a vague tapestry of piss-weak sentiment, culminating in the official slogan of The FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022â˘: the inexplicably trademarked âNow is Allâ˘â.
That creeping uniformity might suit FIFAâs default control-freak mode â but can a competition that dines out so insatiably on its episodic heritage afford for its past few editions (and probably the next few) to look so alike? What have been long regarded as âiconicâ tournaments were also full of imperfections: can an event that raked in $6bn for FIFA at the last attempt ever allow such idiosyncrasies as the lush, glimmering (but actually far too overgrown) turf of the Azteca at Mexico â86, the gargantuan, billowing goalnets of USA â94 or the distinctly club-level provincial stadia of France â98? Not on Gianni Infantinoâs watch!
Letâs also consider the most important cog in the World Cup machine: the players. Or, at least, the famous ones. Hereâs Diego Maradonaâs World Cup rise and fall from 1982-1994 in four pictures:
Again, while the context was largely the same â getting kicked from pillar to post and back again, only to jump to his feet and barrel back for more â the imagery is so distinct, so inextricably tied to those specific tournaments. Even more so when you compare it with four pictures of Lionel Messi from his past four World Cups.
Footballâs pursuit of presentational perfection, a wider but parallel phenomenon to FIFAâs sterilisation of its own product, is an example of what the otherwise slightly sinister lifestyle evangelist Paul Skallas (aka LindyMan) describes as ârefinement cultureâ. For this theory, he used the examples of the high-end homogenisation of the car and smartphone markets.
âIf itâs a newish car made in the past 5â10 years, itâs all the same,â Skallas wrote in 2020. âWhat make? What model? It doesnât matter. Itâs all pretty good. They all run smooth. They all have electronics on the dashboard.â
(For balance, Skallas also believes civilisation doesnât need the concept of breakfast, but his point here still broadly stands.)
FIFA have employed a similar approach to the biggest sporting event on the planet. Take the World Cup logos, for example: not vital to our footballing existences, but nevertheless an increasingly ubiquitous symbol at any tournament. Between 1990 and 2010, it was a creative free-for-all, albeit with creatively diminishing returns. The official logos for the last three World Cups of Brazil 2014, Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022 have all followed the same template.
What was once a nationâs identity for its own tournament has become FIFAâs strict application of its brain-numbing brand identity.
The more living, breathing elements of the World Cup environment are all becoming forcibly assimilated, too: the immaculate pitches have had one, unerring shade of green since 2014 (dictated in part by FIFAâs ludicrous, 81-page guidance for âpitch illuminance systemsâ), every game is now broadcast from what feels like a precisely specified FIFA-sanctioned angle and each piece of penalty-area action is now captured by the most recent World Cup trend of all: the vertigo-inducing, top-down photography previously only seen when your character got WASTED! in GTA: Vice City.
On that note, given the stratospheric success of the FIFA video game franchise, perhaps the governing bodyâs motivation for visual âperfectionâ can be understood a little better. Video game designers are yet to fully capture the chaotic, musculoskeletal minutiae of 22 humans chasing, shoving and second-guessing each other for 90 minutes over possession of a single ball⌠but they can certainly recreate everything around it to a near-imperceptible level of accuracy.
To some extent, this uniformity bleeds into the football itself: an inverted winger trying a curler inside the far post, the same three semi-controversial penalties being awarded, a full-back going to ground under minimal contact near their own corner flag, just to relieve the pressure. Skallasâ refinement culture theory pervades the 4-3-3s and set-piece routines of modern tournament football, too.
All this takes place within the unnecessarily colossal World Cup arenas. The overdue move away from Olympic-style bowls to more intimate-feeling megastadia is a welcome one â but itâs telling that the reaction to the sight of Qatarâs $10billion array of structures has hardly been one of awe. It doesnât matter that the Lusail Iconic Stadium has an ornate gold exterior, or that the Al Janoub accidentally looks like a vulva, or that the Al Bayt deliberately evokes a Bedouin tent: weâve seen it all before in Yekaterinburg, in Brasilia and in Durban. And even then, once inside, you could be anywhere in the world. FIFAâs world, anyway.
If this is a purely innocent pursuit of perfection â to make the World Cup âproductâ as presentable and user-friendly as possible for millions of people â then the question remains: how much more âperfectâ can it get? Qatar 2022 has gorged itself on the latest camera technology (first embraced in La Liga) that presents players in the tunnel in immaculately focused close-up â again, just like their EA Sports likenesses.
Expect World Cup 2026 to have an even smoother look, although perhaps the shared host-nation duties of Canada, USA and Mexico might allow for some glimpses of national â rather than hyperinternational â character. Looking further forward to 2030, perhaps a centenary tournament in South America could save FIFAâs relentless aesthetic from itself⌠or perhaps Saudi Arabia will transplant FIFA-land to the Middle East again. Are there any new camera angles to try?
There is no hint of an aesthetic revolution, let alone a televised one. âIconicâ is such a vacuous footballing word, but we should remember World Cups for their moments, players and snapshots. If every World Cup looks the same as the last, that will become much harder.
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The 3rd place playoff should be tonight and the final tomorrow night.
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The 3rd place play off is a load of bull. In fairness maybe Morocco might take it seriously this time but it should be done away with
Croatia will take it seriously
Some virus in the French camp. Varane and Konate both sick.
Theyâve been poisoned by Messiites
This is like gladiator when commodous wounds maximus before they fight.
Iâve no doubt the French squad have been got at.
Think Argentina should go 3 at the back. Molina is excellent going forward and can really trouble Hernandez.
Why in the name of jeekers is the final at 3 when all the other big games were at 7? I doubt itâs to suit lads in their 40s who want to go drinking for it but still have to get to bed early for work on Monday morning.
So i can watch it then drive ro donegal after?
Itâs to fuck the GAA
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7 is midnight locally. Wouldnât begrudge them having the final in local prime time
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