Aggressive teams in WC 2006

World Cup 2006 is turning out to be a very entertaining world cup to watch. I remember watching the games in the previous world cups with only a handful of attacks, but in this WC, the teams are playing very aggresively. The african teams from Ivory Coast and Trinidad and Tobago gave awesome fight to heavy weight European teams before going down. Ecuador is sitting on top of the group with Germany. The classic heavyweights are looking very sharp this year. Brazil, Argentina, England, Germany are putting up quite a show out there. The fans are amazing and the atmosphere in the stadiums is almost always "electric".

Czech - 3 USA - 0

In the first opening match of Group E against Czech republic, USA succumbed to a 3-0 loss. The Czech team was assumed to be a slower and older team but people forgot that experience is something that is only beatable by superior skills, which the US showed very little of in today's game. The towering czech forward Jon Koller at 6' 7" scored a dream goal in the fifth minute. From this early setback, it felt like the USA never recovered. They were very defensive and scared to tackle one-on-one. After the second goal, they should have been more agressive and should have been trying to make a goal with urgency, but instead of trailing 2-0 to the Czechs, the US team played a slow safe game. They weren't be able to go past the midfield and were taking the ball back all the way to their goalkeeper. This gave them less time to engineer a goal.

At the end of the day, I believe the better team won. If the US wants to survive the first round, they will have to bring a better game against Italy on the 17th.