Sweden went into the 2011 Women's World Cup as anything but favorites. We were thought of as
some kind of unknowns. We hadn't done well at the last Euros and given a string of recent results,
just advancing from the group stage would be a feat of its own. Plus we were in a group with two
supposedly strong teams: North Korea and the United States.
Por Halftown
Desde aquel fatídico día de 2006 en el que Zinedine Zidane hundió la suya en el pecho de
Materazzi, el fútbol francés no ha levantado cabeza.
Muchos (¿todos?) pensamos que la culpa era de Raymond Domenech, ese entrenador incapaz, torpe
sobre el campo e insufrible fuera de él.
Off The Ball never rests in its mission to scratch around the underbelly of professional
football to find the most bizarre, humorous and inexplicable stories.
This week, Domenech calls his France team a bunch of "spoilt brats", Newcastle Jets offer
Michael Owen a cash-plus-horse deal, a posse of Corinthians fans force Ronaldo to retire and
Manchester City defender Joleon Lescott loses more than just the derby to Wayne Rooney.
It's one of the oddities of international football: the French team, which often struggles
against not-so-great opponents and has had tremendous ups and downs in the last decade,
nevertheless seems to have one superpower: they consistently defeat Brazil. If I'm not mistaken,
Brazil went undefeated in World Cup play between their loss in the 1998 Final of the World Cup and
their less to France in 2006.
