Quote:
Originally Posted by Slava
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.
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The whole setup for Croatia was terrible. The dumb comments and then when Croatia overreacted he ran away from it instead of backing his own words and galvanizing his group, and then he goes up against the strongest mid in the group with Hutch on a few days rest with Eustaquaio and plays two forwards in the starting lineup? Eustaquaio gets injured he has to run so much to cover a 41 year old who looked like he was running in quicksand.
The part I struggled with is with Kaye, Piette, Kone all on the bench is that he had the quality to play a 3 man mid and a pitbull in Piette that should have been on the pitch. Not at the quality of Croatia but at least you clog it up and fight in the engine room. Throwing on Larin and David and an exhausted 41 year old in mid was awful. Better player selection against Morocco for the context but again a 2 man mid after getting destroyed there was puzzling, Canada beat better teams than them in qualifying and warmups and should have played to control the ball. To be fair that Borjan goal was horrendous and game turned on it.
Big accomplishment getting there that he should be proud of, but hope Canada isn't just happy to be there in 2026.