And what the fuck does that have to do with the league at this moment in time?
It’s a debating technique to invalidate your previous point, which it has very effectively done.
Italian teams also have technically excellent players but they are pragmatic and take their football seriously, they don’t travel to the big teams to have their bellies tickled. Italian players are well rounded, good tactically, good technically, good defensively. It’s why the national team is generally such a tough team to beat in knockout competitions.
The thing is anyone can look good if the opposition is just going to go out there and offer themselves up as the sacrificial lamb.
How does it do that? If there was a consistently good team in the PL they’d dominate it such as Chelsea who weren’t even that great did last year
It completely invalidates your point about any team being able to beat each other being a sign of poor quality.
It’s just as likely to be a sign of better quality in depth. Which, in this case, it is.
I agree to an extent. But doinf it with club and country he the rrue great, no. Pele is a prixk also and marandona was is the true great to do it with average sides but naymar will join the club if he wins a wc with this current brazilbsode
I agree, being a true great for me is about the ability to do it to the same level irrespective of the surrounding sabout you.
Messi to me is a fraud in this regard, shoots the lights out when the supporting cast and optimum conditions are around him, when they’re not he looks lost. He plays with excellent players with Argentina as well but they’re not fine-tuned into the way he wants and his performances suffer as a result. The true greats are not at the mercy of the externals, everything is at their mercy - that was the way Maradona played the game, it was the way the real Ronaldo played the game.
The best player in the world right now is Suarez, you could put 10 dumplings around him and he’d still load them on his back and play like the great champion he is, he’d do the best he possibly could with those players.
What if there was a great player that came from, say, Liechtenstein or American Samoa?
Qualifying for, never mind winning a World Cup, is rather unlikely.
My point wasn’t that it was a sign of poor quality, my point was that the reason that any team can beat any other in the league this season is because there is no good team in it. In the mid to late noughties you had real strength in depth in the Premier League with some very good teams such as Chelsea, Man Utd, Liverpool and Arsenal in this time. Last season a not great Chelsea team utterly dominated the league and lost less league games than both Barca and Real Madrid who were much better teams
Naymar is younger though and could pull it off. Current argies though arent that great
Suarez is an immense leader which he does have over Messi but for Barcelona both Messi and Neymar are better than him although it is very close between the three at the moment
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Messi is indoctrinated in the Barca style, he looks a far inferior player to his Barca self when you take him out of his environment. Great players can adapt, they are not slaves to the externals - Messi needs the supporting cast around him.
I’ve had this debate with you many times Nembo so I won’t go into it again but I do think you vastly overrate the Argentina team. Their much lauded attack apart from Messi consists of Di Maria who is wildly inconsistent, Aguero who is a crock and Higuain who is a top class bottler. Without Messi in their last few games they have looked absolutely woeful.
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They picked up 4 points away to Brazil and Colombia without Messi.
Pastore, Mascherano, Biglia, Di Maria, Dybala, Icardi, Aguero, Higuain, Tevez, Lamela, Otamendi, etc, etc, etc.
How many countries can compete with that talent base? Messi is meant to be not only the best player in the world but in some sectors the greatest of all time - why does he continue to falter with Argentina? I’ll tell you why - he only performs in the custom built environment.
You don’t have a point. In any given season in England, any team can beat each other. That’s always been the way. So you can’t rate the overall quality of the league in a given season based on that, no more than you can if there’s one outstanding team who runs away with a league by getting 98 or 100 points, as Barcelona have done several times.
Chelsea won the league comfortably last year but people were calling the league shit because they were running away with it. Now that there’s a weekly battle between four or five teams to be top, they’re calling it shit because no team is running away with it.
What is certain is that a league where four or five are battling to be top on a weekly basis is far more exciting than a league in which everybody already knows who the champions are going to be, which is the case in Spain, Germany and France.
You can’t win with some people.
He led them to their best world cup performance in 24 years
Led them?
He disappeared mate and let the less glamorous names take over.
Leicester City are top of the league mate. It is shit. There is no team that will be in the Champions League semis or maybe even quarters. I don’t get excited by watching shit teams
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We’ve had this conversation before mate, it doesn’t matter
Suarez has been on a different planet to anybody else since about February. And overall he’s been the best player in the world since the start of 2013.
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