chris79

That was top entertainment, I enjoyed it. Thanks, @Sons FC for running it! I even had my moment of glory with that 3rd spot after the semis. An unexpected visit (or rather unexpectedly early visit) on the day of the final from a friend who boycotted the tournament interrupted my plans and I forgot to post my predictions for the final day. Who knows what would have been...

I forgot to post my predictions ☹️☹️☹️

Third/fourth place play off Saturday 17th December Croatia v Morocco 0-2 I'll post the final predictions later.

Semi-finals Tuesday 13th December Argentina v Croatia 2-0 Wednesday 14th December France v Morocco 3-0 Bonuses The total number of goals across all the games - 5 The total number of goals scored in the first half - 2 The total number of goals scored in the second half - 3 The total number of goals scored after 90 minutes - 0 The total number of hattricks - 0 The number of games going to extra time - 0 The number of games going to penalties - 0 The total number of penalties scored (including those in normal game play) - 1 The team which scores the fastest goal - France The team which scores the last goal - Argentina The time of the first goal - 5minutes The time of the last goal - 76 minutes The scorer of the first goal - La La La La Giroud The scorer of the last goal - Messi The total number of yellow cards - 6 The total number of red cards - 0 The total number of substitutions across all games 13

Quarter-Finals Friday 9th December Croatia v Brazil 0-2 Netherlands v Argentina 2-1 AET Saturday 10th December Morocco v Portugal 0-3 England v France 2-0 Bonuses The total number of goals across all the games - 9 The total number of goals scored in the first half - 3 The total number of goals scored in the second half - 6 The number of games going to extra time - 1 Correctly predicting all the specific games going to extra time - NED-ARG The number of games going to penalties - 0 The total number of penalties scored (including those in normal game play) - 2 The team which scores the fastest goal - POR The team which scores the last goal - POR The time of the first goal - 8 The time of the last goal - 87 The total number of yellow cards - 9 The total number of red cards - 0 The total number of substitutions across all games -31

Portugal vs Switzerland 1-2

aparat from everything else I think Brazil players were looking a lot better physically. Like it was a second game od the day for Korea

You mean "something like 41-0 etc"?

instantly made me think about these goals from Wilshere and Rosicky. insane assist.

we should have allowed Szczęsny to take this penalty ☹️

Was good in 2016 but everyone was then.

I've never experienced something like that I guess. Poland doing "well" in a big tournament and absolutely no signs of enthusiasm, no optimism in the country. Everyone seems to be simply tired and embarrassed by the way the team has been playing, everyone seems to be expecting an awful performance today, resulting in a big loss. I don't think I've seen a single car with a Polish flag in the city in the last week or two. Normally there were a lot of them when we played at W/EURO. And it is hard to find any kind of hope for today, anything like "well maybe today this player will start to performs, that tactic will start to work". Even the players keep on saying they will play the same way. I am generally in a "I wish it was over already" mood. That said, anything is possible in football and apart from 80 minutes of Argentina game, we have been very pragmatic and effective tactically.

Group G 19:00 Cameroon 0-2 Brazil 19:00 Serbia 1-1 Switzerland Group H 15:00 Ghana 1-2 Uruguay 15:00 South Korea 0-0 Portugal Bonuses How many goals will be scored in the round in total? 35 How many games will go to extra time? 5 How many games will go to penalties - 4 ***Crazy Bonus***How many penalties will be scored in total (all penalties, including normal game time and those which go to penalties) - 22 How many yellow cards will there be across the games? 26 How many red cards will there be across the games? - 3 Round of 16 Saturday 3rd December Netherlands v USA 15:00 2-1 Argentina v Australia 1-0 Sunday 4th December France v Poland 4-0 England v Senegal 3-0

I can understand the opinions about Poland from most of people, I rate teams that I don't follow in a similar way - I don't like what I see and just want them to go out, wan them to lose another game etc. But, I'll quote what Szczęsny said post game: "Yes, it was very hard in this game because we played a team not 'from our shelf' [a team that is on a completely another level], a team that can afford to keep the ball for 90 minutes and not let us even sniff it. It is fun playing against such teams, you even win one out of 100 games - but it wasn't a case today". Every single interview, including the one with our coach is like that. There was no euphoria, you could even sense some sort of shame that we played so badly. But here's the thing. IMO this is by far the worst group of players we had at a major tournament in this century. Some like Glik and Krychowiak are way past their peak, others like Bednarek are having bad spells in their careers. There are really no impressive youngsters pushing them. So "Poland is always worse than sum of its parts/level of their club performers" is simply not true this time. Lewy, Zieliński and Szczęsny and that's it on club level. Almost every other team has a lot of players from say Dutch top flight or even Serie A bottom teams. Krystian Bielik (League One? Championship?) is an important player of this team FFS! Another thing that probably a lot of people miss is that we were abandoned by Paolo Sousa in the last days of 2021. He was a really fine coach in a technical sense, but a lot of strange stuff was going on, like him selecting a weaker aquad for our last qualifier which led to us losing the seed in the play offs. Eventually he turned out to be an unprofessional asshole, he asked our FA to be allowed to take a role at a Brazilian club. He was sacked asap, less than 4 months before our qualifying play off (originally vs Russia). So there was a big decision for the FA - go for a long term ambitious project (after one just crashed) or for a pragmatic, but limited coach. They choose the former, and that's what we have. A coach who started from scratch early in 2022. In these circumstances, I see us getting more than 1 point as a very good result. I don't think we played as negatively as I was expecting us to do. We were the better team in the first two games, even if the stats say otherwise (esp. vs Arabia, they ran a lot of with the ball but not much came out of it. That missed pen from Lewandowski eventually meant we didn't win the group. We had 3 great chances vs Arabia that we missed (hit the bar, hit the post and Lewandowski missed a simple 1 on 1), taking 2 of these would mean no nerves today even if we were 3 goals down. Yet people are sometimes acting as if we had England's level of players and decided to play all out defence. I was, against all logic, silently hoping we would play better today and start growing into something bigger but it is what it is - a pragmatic team that is overperforming at World Cup. This is our best WC result since 1986 and it comes with the worst players we ever brought to this tournament (well, I have no idea about the 1930s, we played once back then). There are no big celebrations, no real hopes for the France game, but c'mon, it is not like we got there by refusing to play football or kick the opponents. Hey, we had been refereed terribly in the last two games, especially vs Arabia. Just a couple of thoughts from the other side.