Today’s open thread. We’re going to try and do this daily for the remainder of the World Cup, just to give you a platform to discuss the games, while allowing the rest of the comment-sections to stay relevant to their respective articles.
Notes & Quotes
Argentina complains, Dalic ignores
Croatia head coach Zlatko Dalic has announced he’s going to rest six starters — Luka Modric possibly among them, while Mateo Kovacic may finally get a start — in their last match against Iceland. Neither Nigeria head coach Gernot Rohr nor Argentina head coach Jorge Sampaoli are happy about this, but Dalic is well within his rights, and has put up a veil to the noise.
“We’ve prepared the same way as we did for the first two [matches],” he told reporters in Rostov.
”We’ve come here to win, not to concede and to… achieve top spot. I don’t care what other teams are saying. We’re minding our own business. What others are commenting, that’s their business.”
Croatia 98 vs Croatia 2018, per Dalic:
“It’s very difficult to compare the two generations,” Dalic said.
”Football is different, the way the game is played is different. But we have excellent players, just as we did in 1998.
”Maybe this generation plays in bigger clubs, Barcelona, Real Madrid, Inter, Juventus. But the 1998 generation is a benchmark, we remember them fondly. We want to reach them.
”We have great chances, we will take it step by step. It’s very difficult to replicate what they did but we will do our best to get as close to them as possible.”
Assorted
Flamengo have confirmed that Vinícius Júnior is joining Real Madrid in July, so he won't stay at Flamengo until the end of the year as Flamengo had hoped. https://t.co/sc8wx9G9Cj
— Paulo Freitas (@Cynegeticus) June 24, 2018
Chegou tua hora de brilhar... ⚫️⚪️ @realmadrid @flamengo pic.twitter.com/H6N8t6ucXA
— Vinicius Jr (@vini11Oficial) June 25, 2018
Man of the Match: Isco. #ESP pic.twitter.com/JYnbPdtHO4
— Match of the Day (@BBCMOTD) June 25, 2018
FYI
Quick note: We took Sunday night off the MM podcast.
— Kiyan Sobhani (@KiyanSo) June 26, 2018
Kiyan - Luka's 1st bday@ElEzrah - food poisoning@MattWiltse4 - travellling@OmVArvind - shopping
Will make Wednesday's mid-week 'Patron' pod open to the public.