Quote:
Originally Posted by Matty81
Can only speak for myself, but there's no hate towards Croatia as a country, just a little bit of rivalry there that wasn't before where I'm not a neutral towards them - I thought that there was a misstep by Herdman, but then just a wall of hotheaded behavior and words.
To be fair though, Herdman was an idiot with his comments. I love what the guy has done for Canada with his Ted Lasso off the field team spirit approach but he was so naive this whole tournament, he lit a fire under one opponent and fielded teams that got completely overrun in midfield by playing a two man unit that included a guy who was injured and another who was over 40. The only game where his tactics were on and he was unlucky was Belgium. Canada should have come out of that group in 2nd IMO with a better tactician. But no regret, we finally made it to the party.
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I agree with that. I'm not sure about a rivalry, but the rest of your comments are bang-on. Herdman screwed that up. You can make those bulletin board comments to the team when you're behind closed doors, but no tin the media. And yeah, the set-up for that game was just perplexing.
I will say that we were in tough though. The Croatian midfield is really levels above ours, and then to have us play 2 vs. 3 there even without the 40 year old and injury is questionable. At the same time though, it's not like we have a lot of depth there to replace those two and have 3 solid players to play against that world class trio.
Canada deserved better against Belgium. Morocco is just a better team than a lot of people realise. I'm not sure that we were set for 2nd place. I feel like we could make that if absolutely everything broke for us, but on a good day we draw Morocco and maybe don't get wrecked against Croatia.