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Minus the Shooting

Well Struck: Jack Warner’s Noose, Thomas Hobbes’ Favorite Side & the Real Group of Death

If the sports section had stories as good as these, I’d start reading it again…or at least the three column inches currently engulfed by Wilbon and Boswell:

World Cup College: England’s tension between neo-realism and Hobbes’ mechanism

Zonal Marking’s 23-man all-World Cup-side

Soccer Spieler dares look back to name the real Group of Death

Tim Vickery’s advice to Brazil: Hire Leonardo and start attacking

Isn’t it time to take down the World Cup flags?

Said & Done wraps the World Cup: Jack Warner’s noose, how many teachers executive hospitality costs in South Africa would have employed, and the best FIFA expenses ever claimed

Watford Academy: Jockeys + ballet + school = the envy of Europe

Sleep well, Minus the Shooting and World Cup College — you will be missed

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Why You Can’t Truly See Bastian Schweinsteiger

The milky refractions of history: Brian Phillips at Slate argues all soccer romantics (i.e., lovers of Dutch soccer history) should be rooting for Holland’s true heirs Spain Sunday, saying that “great teams in other sports beat their opponents. Great teams in soccer beat both their opponents and the game.” Stefan Fatsis at The Goal Post wonders for whom Papa Cruyff will be rooting. And Charles Holland (!) at Minus the Shooting says such “myths of the near past” obscure our clarity of vision for national teams — we can’t see how boring Spain really is, or Bastian Schweinsteiger as subtle and sophisticated.

Reads of the Day: Mythbusters

How many more historical narratives can this World Cup overturn? The Dutch and the Germans have switched shirts, says David Winner at Fair Play — “Germans are teaching the Dutch to win, the Dutch [like Van Gaal and van Marwijk] are teaching the Germans to play spatially-sophisticated attacking football.” Maybe the narratives of all four semifinalists were never true to being with, argues Tom Dunmore at Pitch Invasion. But beware the voodoo death, warns Minus the Shooting — the physiology of belief, “belief instantiated in the autonomic nervous system,” that underpins why opponents collapse when a German midfielder simply appears organized.