NETHERLANDS 2, DENMARK 0
Probably the most surprising thing here is that neither side had anyone die of sunburn. The result was pretty much as expected, although Holland did have a little more trouble penetrating the Danes defenses than was expected. A fluke own goal opened the scoring, and Dirk Kuyt put it away for the Oranje late in the match. The Danes packed the midfield pretty tight, because as we all know, if there is a hole in the middle, that's not a Danish, it's a donut. Stay tuned to recaps of future Netherlands matches for all the Joran van der Sloot references you could ever hope for.
JAPAN 1, CAMEROON 0
Almost without exception, the African nations all looked horrible in their prep matches. Although I have a soccer blog, and read anything I can get my hands on about soccer, I am still pretty much neophyte. I was assured by people more futbol literate than me that the prep matches mean nothing. Well, here we are gone live and the African countries still look like crap. Cameroon surrendered a goal in the 38th minute to Keisuke "Piston" Honda, and couldn't answer. The win is the first for Japan on non-Japanese soil in World Cup play.
ITALY 1, PARAGUAY 1
The consensus in the break room amongst the soccer congoscenti at my company watching the match is that Italy is old and bad. They certainly lived up to both of those labels in this match. The defending champs fell behind early, and lost star goaltender Gianluigi Buffon to a back injury. They managed to get a goal from AS Roma's Daniele De Rossi in the second half to avoid total disaster, but judging by the first match, it looks like we are going to have a new World Cup champion in 2010.
GROUP E STANDINGS
Netherlands 3 +2
Japan 3 +1
Cameroon 0 -1
Denmark 0 -2
No comments:
Post a Comment