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Wednesday, June 26, 2002 |
Miguel asks about whether Korea can disappear from the World Cup scene in future years. He wants to know what has happened before. I said nobody remembers third and fourth place. We could only remember a few. Here is the list of the first four placed teams (in order) from 1970 on (the number in parenthesis is the goals scored in their last game):
- 1970: Brazil (4), Italy (1), Germany(1), Uruguay (0).
- 1974: Germany (2), Holland (1), Poland (1), Brazil (0).
- 1978: Argentina (3), Holland (1), Brazil (2), Italy (1).
- 1982: Italy (3), Germany (1), Poland (3), France (2).
- 1986: Argentina (3), Germany (2), France (4), Belgium (2).
- 1990: Germany (1), Argentina (0), Italy (2), England (1).
- 1994: Brazil (2), Italy (2), Sweden (4), Bulgary (0).
- 1998: France (4), Brazil (0), Croazia (2), Holland (1).
As you can see, some names repeat over and over. Others come and go not to be seen again in the first four. Another interesting thing is the high scores of the third place game...
I did only from 1970, because that is considered the beginning of the modern era.
6:44:07 PM 
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Politics in FIFA are getting as murky as they can get. Codesal and Zen-Ruffinen have accused Blatter and his friends, particularly Walker from CONCACAF and Chung from Korea, of pushing the bad referees so they could help Koreans in The Dirty World Cup. Blatter defends himself and points that Zen-Ruffinen was in charge of the referees oversight committee...
Italy, a traditional enemy of Blatter, and Spain, a traditional ally, will side against Blatter. It is likely that Germany and Brazil will side with him.
The propositions to fix the problems of the referee are sort of crazy. Another referee just to watch the goals (that would be two referees, one for each goal, no?) was proposed by Platini. Others are insisting with instant video replays, how much will that slow down the game? Still others are blaming referees from countries without a tradition in football, as if the spanish Lopez Nieto wasn't one of the worst referees, though he wasn't one sided, just bad. Nobody is looking at the simple solution Italy has used successfully for years, why?
1:19:17 PM
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This silly thing will never die!. Now, Ahn says it doesn't want anything to do with Perugia... Weird, this could be a terrible decision for Ahn, Perugia owns him and can severely damage his career. Either that, or I was right after all and they already now somebody else will adquire him, Perugia will make money and everybody will be happy...
12:56:38 PM
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Apple PR Manager fired after Gartner fiasco [The Macintosh News Network]
This is an amazing story. If I understand correctly, Gartner does research that shows Macs are 36% cheaper to own than PCs. An APple PR manager hearing this great news start makes a public announcement of the result, but didn't ask for authorization from Gartner to go public. Apple fires the PR manager and now Gartner says they no longer "own" the research...
Isn't this a weird way of attaining the truth? Why is Gartner research secret? I understand they want to sell it and they are angry at Apple, that by making it public make it harder to sell it, but why deny it now? It just doesn't make sense...
Apple dumps Aussie PR after news coup
[The Register]Gartner's Australian office should be taking the heat: having conducted research which was supposed to "combat the perception that Macs are more expensive than PCs", and having seemingly written a report to that effect, and having then handed that report to Apple's PR as the customer, Gartner has recoiled in horror when the information was actually published. But what else do you do with payola research?
12:30:54 PM
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By the way, in a normal World Cup, teams from the same group wouldn't have had a rematch until the final... But FIFA didn't wanted Korea or Japan to have to play in each other country, thus Turkey was robbed of its rightful place a finalist, though it is one of the two better teams. What can I say? This is the Dirty World Cup.
10:59:14 AM
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Brazil wins! Great game. Turkey should beat Korea in a fair game, so put your money in Korea because this is The Dirty World Cup.
9:24:29 AM
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The semi final game between Brazil and Tukey is showing how weak the Koreans and Germans are. Great game. Like a real semi final. Yesterday, Richard Paez, the coach of the venezuelan national team, opined that Korea was a good team. As much as I respect him I have to disagree with him. They shouldn't have gone as far as they did and this game shows it. Except for a German miracle, we are watching the next champion today.
8:08:48 AM
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© Copyleft 2005 Alfredo Octavio.
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