Indian Army troops crossing the Chindwin River in Burma, January 1945.

More Valentines is always good news.

Here's to another year of Forgotten Hope! I'm back home for the holidays and back to my favorite game.

Cactus Friends assemble!

Yeah, France was lucky. Their performance, although good, is still unconvincing. Both Belgium and France clearly shows a couple of weakness in their defense, luckily both of them have good goalkeepers, Lloris and Courtois are surely among the world's greatest goalkeepers. They will disappoint whoever gets through the semifinal, Mandzukic or Kane.

Have to disagree with you there. France has an iron-clad defense which never really looked troubled in the Belgium game, I think Belgium could have had another hour and not scored. The exception was Pavard, who was being eaten alive by Hazard in the first half of the game. France is happy to play counter-attack football because with people like Mbappe they can just run down the opponent; England especially will be vulnerable to that. France is not very fun to watch but they have convinced.

We made it! phew, disaster avoided!


With a very effective Messi, scoring a fantastic goal and almost making it double with a great free kick. Still, there are problems like a very inaccurate Mascherano and some defensive problems. A last minute goal by Rojo, someone I would avoid having in my team to secure our match against France.

That's gonna be a real tough one.

Hell yeah, that was a game. A last minute goal by Rojo on his weak foot, of all things. I can't believe it but I really wanted Argentina to win  The Nigerians played well but they did not deserve it, and I even think their penalty was a little soft.

Hopefully the game against France should be interesting. They have been pretty boring and their match today was absolutely dire as Zoo said. I can see Argentina keeping up the momentum. I'm not sure if Mascherano had a good game or a horrible one; at one point he gave away two passes within like five seconds but then made a great tackle to save his own ass.

Tomorrow: watching Germany beat the hell out of poor South Korean defenders (or watching South Koreans practice their Taekwondo moves on the Germans as they did on the Mexicans). 

Final thoughts: what do you all make of the VAR? There have been tons of penalties, nearly one a game it feels like. And some very dodgy calls using it today and yesterday. It really does not seem to have made things anymore clear, although it has made them much more dramatic.

Edit: Final final thoughts: Is Maradona ok?

This World Cup was to be intended to serve as a complete renovation of our team, departing the "stars" from the 2014 WC, 2015 Copa America and 2016 Copa America Centenario. Our coach, who I think is a big asshole, promised us change but he didn't deliver.

You point out Messi lacks confidence on himself, probably, yes, Ronaldo is a fanatic of himself and he does what he does for himself. Both players had almost the very same situations in their respective games (penalties and last-minute free kicks), one did better and the other didn't. Messi had a bad day and we can't expect his teammates to be of much help, and we pay the price.

I think Argentina will struggle a lot in groups stage and we highly depend on what happens with Croatia, they have a superb midfield but are also more offensive, which would leave open spaces to Messi. We need to kick Di Maria out of the team and have Pavon play there, he did much better in 15 minutes than Di Maria in this match and the whole Qualifiers together.

Anyways, this edition is Brazilian, if they do just fine, they'll win. Germany comes in second, the rest are watching imo.

Argentina looks a bit of a shambles. You need a decent team as a springboard for stars to shine and they do not have that, although I think Messi has done heroic work getting them to the World Cup so I think it's unfair when people say he's useless as an international player. In their pre-WC interviews, some of the Argentine players were talking about how they hope they will be "worthy of Messi" or things like that. It just seems like there is a really fatalistic attitude there.