The nightmare I was fearing.

[ASHOOR]

I don’t have much to say about the Brazil vs Croatia as it all feels like a bad dream. It hurts so much, I am trying to completely tune it out and forget about the World Cup.

At the end of the day, Tite’s inferiority was greater than our players’s superiority. While not all our players were great of course, nor was Tite all bad as a coach, but his system and 6 years of coaching just wasn’t good enough despite the abundance of talent at his disposal.

See you in 3.5 years, where our cup drought by then will be 24 years from 2002, matching post Pele drought and which was finally broken in 1994 in the U.S. that is also where the next World Cup will be, so….

 

[ASHOOR]

The frustrations and disappointments of 1974-1990 (even with Zico, Socrates, Careca) is what eventually led to the golden generation of 1994-2002.

As soccer cycles go, it is inevitable that the disappointments of 2006-2022 will hopefully lead to the cycle of victory repeating again. Yes, the loss to the first European team in the knockout has become like a law. But that law will eventually be broken. In fact , we came close yesterday but still wasn’t meant to be.

While half of this team will be gone by the next WC, a big core will remain, especially the young 21-22 players (quartet of Rodrygo, Vinicius, Martinelli, Antony)

Until then, Brazil needs to start realizing that if you can’t score at the word cup, it wont matter how good your defending is. Croatia literally scored from their only shot on goal. So you can nullify all other chances, it wont matter if you don’t put your chances away, because the other team may score from their only chance.

So really, this all comes down to one thing: Brazil lost this because of their inability to score. All stats show that Brazil had one of the worst and least efficient scoring teams in the tournament, where they failed to score in 7 out of 11 halves. Imagine if Brazil put away even one of their many chances in regular time. Game would likely open up, leading to create more space for Brazil and score more and not needing ET.

In other words, despite the massive improvement to the talent and depth of the team from 2018 to 2022, scoring never improved - even the SK game was anomaly to me - and that probably goes back to the coach’s tactics and formations etc.

 

[ASHOOR]

This was my blood pressure yesterday between the time Croatia scored in ET and going to penalties.

I gave my heart a lot of hardships last two weeks and it is time to give it some rest and rehab.

 

[Crocodile Bani]

Losing hurts, and that was a heart breaking loss. After all that hard work, Neymar had come up with the goods and then totally unexpected, Croatia equalised at the death of the game. Their goalkeeper seems to have a knack for guessing the right way. One thing that went against Brazil is that they used too many inexperienced penalty takers. Several players had not taken a penalty in their professional career. Mind you, luis Enrique instructed all his players 2 years ago to take 1000 penaltiues before the world cup (of course this includes training). Unfortunately, that didn't help Spain.