Achievement of the Day
Bahamut: 21,000 Posts
A very difficult pick between you and iscrulz, but I feel that yours is more rare. So congrats!
Also, are you finally gonna upload your hundred flash when you reach 22,222 then? ;)
Congrats to:
Rabid-Animals: Sergeant
Pokemonpoeguygcn: 40,000 Total Stats
Hacsev: 7,000 Experience
vader316: 9.00 Voting Power
iscrulz: Level 48
Pokemonpoeguygcn: 6,000 Experience
At 3/11/10 05:05 AM, Haggard wrote:
At 3/10/10 11:16 AM, Auz wrote:
Really? :p
Sure :P
Lol, what is it for? Bath-coats :p?
Ha! I loved how you guys failed in that in EC 2004, with the Czech screwing you guys over. Great times.
Yeah, it's only topped by the bad performance the dutch team delivered at the WC 2002... oh wait, you didn't even qualify for that. :P
Waaah waaah waaah. Shut up :p
I don't think Holland has ever had that problem. Our offensive players have always been really good. It's our defense that occasionally screws up though.
Jan Wouters was a pretty tough guy, but he's about the only dutch defender I know. ^^
Not sure from which era Jan Wouters was. I think from long ago, because I don't know much about him actually.
Anyway I think our best and most bad-ass defender of the past two decades was Jaap Stam. Seriously if I was up against him as a striker, I'd be shitting my pants.
Jeez that guy was amazing. I don't think I have ever seen a player before that has an almost 1:1 goals to matches ratio over his entire career. More than 1:1 on the national team is even more impressive.
I know they used to play way more offensive several decades ago, but still... I don't think many players have matched him.
Yeah, those kind of players are really rare. He had what whe call a "Torriecher", he just seemed to knew where the ball would be after a team mate fired a shot, so he almost always stood in the right place. :D
Like a 'goalgetter' right? I believe that's the English term. I think strikers like that are never that popular, but they're usually the most effective ones.
I think Holland has definitely learned that lesson at the beginning of last decade. Our average age must've been like 29 years old back then and we didn't even manage to qualify for the 2002 WC even though we had a great team on paper.
That's what I don't understand. The dutch team is ALWAYS great on paper, so you'd expect them to come very far in a tournament, but somehow they always fail. Much like the english team. They have great players, but the team performs pretty badly.
At the moment our team is not so impressive on paper I think. Our offense is pretty good since most of them are base players for clubs like Bayern Munchen and Liverpool. But for the rest a lot of them are still playing in the dutch competition, which is widely known as a "Mickey Mouse"-league.
And as for the English team, the current team looks pretty good but most of the times they're not that impressive on paper if you ask me :p They usually have a good player or two, but the rest always seems like a scattered bunch to me. You know, lots of low-profile players playing for English "middenmoters" as we call them. The clubs that are happy when they can play for the UEFA cup again in the next season (Birmingham, Aston Villa, Everton etc.).
Not that the german team has won anything since the EC 1996 and the performances in the EC 2000 (only 1 point in the group phase... but at least the dutch team managed to miss 5 penalties in the match against Italy, so even the germans had something to laugh in that tournament. :P )
Oh yeah, our team was so bad at taking penalties back then. Both in 98 and 00 we were kicked out of the tournament because of penalty series. We scored only 3 out of the 8. In 96 we were also eliminated after penalties (5-4 against France). And you probably know Clarence Seedorf. I have never ever seen that guy scoring a single penalty in his entire carreer, yet coaches always let him take one for some reason. Even in the Champions League final of 2003 he missed one for AC Milan.
Fortunately the new generation of players after 2002 knows how to take penalties.
and 2004 (seriously, 0:0 against Latvia??) where REALLY bad , but second in 2002, third in 2006, and again second in 2008 is quite impressive, imo.
Yeah it's pretty good. Sure a lot better than Holland has done lately. I believe fourth place in 1998 and semi-finalist in '00 and '04 was the highest in the past 12 years.
Also wasn't Germany the best team on tournaments of all time or something?