Archive for the ‘Soccer’ Category

The American Women’s Soccer team, after all that, have won gold at the 2012 Olympic games. There was just so much schadenfreude running through this game, it was kind of unbelievable. I do not think it is a stretch to say that most Canadians were not rooting for the Americans. After the events of the semifinal match, it would have been lots of fun to see the team from Japan upset the Americans, if only to see the Twitter reactions. Personally, I do not consider myself a particularly strong nationalist so, at the Olympics, I find that I generally just root to see amazing athletes do amazing things, regardless of country. Of course I prefer Canadians to win medals over others but I rarely find myself actively rooting against Olympic athletes. That being said, I was absolutely rooting for the Japanese in this game. Unfortunately, at least from my perspective, the Americans defeated the Japanese 2-1 in the final game.

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The Canadian Women’s Football team has won a bronze medal. After all that. Oh yeah, and the winning goal was scored by Diana Matheson in stoppage time. There’s some weird karmic angle to this. I’m sure this will be hammered home by, well, everybody but after the events of the semifinal match against the United States the odd poetic justice can’t really be ignored. I don’t think I need to recap that game’s events (and, seriously, would you even want to hear about it at this point?) but after being outplayed all game by France and then scoring the winning goal in stoppage time, well, it all seems relatively familiar at this point. Just the opposite.

France absolutely dominated Canada for the majority of the 93 minutes of play, outshooting the Canadians 25-4 (4-1 on target) and, not surprisingly, getting the majority of the chances. Canada looked drained and fatigued for most of the game and, until the last few minutes, the game felt very much like a hangover from the insanity that was the semifinals. But this is sports, so weird things happen. Canada got their chance and Matheson buried it into an open net, in stoppage time, to give the Canadians a deserved, yet totally undeserved, 1-0 victory.

It’s a nice capper to the team’s journey through these Olympics as at least they can take solace in the fact that they won something (also, I’ve long held that, in team sports, bronze is actually better than silver because you have to win your last game to get the medal). Regardless of result today, however, these women have made us all care about their sport and, with all due respect to the rest of our country’s athletes, have captured the defining moments of these games. At least I think so but I’m also an idiot so take that as you will).

High fives and respect nods all around for these women. You done us proud.

Oh yeah, one more thing. Go Japan. If my thoughts on bronze being better than silver in team sports holds true (and it totally does because deal with it), then an American defeat in the final would make Canada the real winner here. Well, in another, more accurate way, Japan would be the winner. But I’ll take it.

Game in a sentence

As most of the nation’s eyes focused on the track at Olympic Stadium, Great Britain’s footballers fell to South Korea on penalties.
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Game in sentence

A thrilling Quarterfinal in Newcastle sees Brazil narrowly overcome 10 9 man Honduras in a contender for game of the tournament.
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No, David Beckham won’t be there, but there will not be a shortage of star power in this year’s Men’s Olympic tournament. Thanks to the competition’s unique rules – all players must be under 23 except for three wild cards – we’ll get to see a rare combination of young and old battling for Olympic Gold.
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