Pounding away

I still need to write up my notes on the quarter-finals of the World Cup, but holy crap! that game yesterday.

I figured it'd be close to a toss-up with both teams at full strength, so with Silva and Neymar out, I did expect a German victory.  But man, did Brazil crap the bed.

I joked to a friend of mine, after the third goal, that it looked like Brazil had already given up.  He responded that they were doing the traditional turtling, defensively, except that this turtle was on its back and thrashing.

And then there were a couple more German goals, in short order.  After that stretch, figured the Germans would score a few more.

What I didn't realize, going in, was how key Silva was at the back end.  I knew how big a deal Neymar missing was, but didn't know that Silva was the coordination for the defense.  At least, I hope that was it, because there was no coordination on the back end.

For a while, not only were Germans finding space anywhere they wanted to, but they weren't even being pressed until they got within ten yards of the Brazilian box.  It was incredible.

When Mueller scored in the 11th minute, on the Germans' first corner, he was basically uncovered.  I saw a tweet saying that he'd "found a thiago silva-sized hole", and that seems about right.

It took about ten more minutes for the Germans to score again (Klose, this time, with a generous feed from Mueller and a bit of luck on a rebound.  That was enough to give him the all-time World Cup goal-scoring record), but then they scored three more in rapid succession after that.  The remaining fifteen minutes or so of the first half went fairly quickly,  with the Germans able to move about at will, but unable to score.

The second half finally showed a bit of spine from the Brazilians; in fact, they had several good scoring chances in the first few minutes of the half.  Some of that was due to the German's playing extremely avoiding of any fouls, and thereby giving a lot of space.  That still might have been a good strategy, though, as the Brazilians were diving all over the place, and that might have been less obvious.

But Schuerrle came in for Klose not too long after, and he got into the scoring act with a pair of his own (to match Kroos' brace and exceed Khedira's lone tally).

The rest of the game was pretty desultory, with occasional attempts by each team to score (Oezil missed a nearly-empty net off to the side some time around the 85th minute), but the only remaining score can from Oscar in the 90th minute.  I was surprised the ref gave them as much stoppage time as he did, but it was still two minutes.

I saw a funny tweet doing scoring equivalents of that final margin.  Though funny, it seems a bit off-base, in some of those sports.  Baseball being twenty-two seems reasonable.  NFL seems twenty or so points high as well (it's been well over 800 games (how many all-time World Cup games there've been) since anyone has scored even 80 points in an NFL game.  Actually, just did a bit of research, and highest score since 1940 seems to be 73 (when the Bears beat the Redskins for the title; hadn't realized that was highest-scoring game since then).  So 107 is pretty bizarre.

And the NBA one is just wacky-land.  I'm fairly sure no one has ever scored even half that many in a single game.  One quarter that many is well short of an everyday occurence.  484 is eight points a minute.  That's at least three baskets a minute over an entire game.  Crazy.

And I might need to rethink that NHL comparison.  Since the 1917-18 season, there have been eight games with 14+ goals scored by one team (none in almost thirty-three years).  Eight in almost a hundred years.  Over 12000k games just in the last eleven seasons.

One in 800+ would be significantly less than that, and this was not the most lopsided result ever seen in the World Cup, so probably eleven or twelve would be a more reasonable number for NHL equivalence.