Having watched the last 20 mins, I've remembered just how **** we were under Van Gaal. Dull and laborious ****e. Getting flashbacks, I'd switch off but I'm enjoying Ecuador. They should be ahead.
Netherlands could play this out for a draw, knowing they have Qatar in the next game. Whereas Ecuador have the harder game against Senegal.
Gakpo aside, the Dutch have been average over both games. Rather face them than Senegal/ Ecuador in the next round.
I genuinely believe it though Tonight, England and USA will both be up for it but our quality will tell. OK I won't make a prediction
If there's one player who knows how to make a statement at a World Cup and fck the consequences, it's Roy Keane.
One will disappear completely. Stadium 974 — the name derived from Qatar’s international dialling code — is made entirely from recycled shipping containers. Lusail Stadium, this year's tournament's biggest with a capacity of 80,000, will host the World Cup final, but never see another game of international football. Designed by architects Foster+Partners, the huge golden bowl will have most of its seats stripped away and be repurposed for shops, cafes and possibly a school and health clinics. The upper tiers will be transformed into housing, while the pitch will be used for community games. Al Bayt Stadium, the second largest, has a tent-like design which honours Qatari heritage and will host the opening game, as well as quarter-finals and a semi-final. It, too, will radically change after the tournament. The upper tiers will be removed and replaced by a new five-star hotel, shopping centre and sports medicine hospital. But then you read this... Brazil’s 2014 World Cup left many cities struggling with expensive maintenance costs for stadiums that, in some cases, now house merely a few hundred spectators. Arena da Amazonia cost about $250 million to build in Manaus, an area in the middle of the Amazon that is difficult to reach and has now been virtually abandoned. Greece spent about $11 billion when Athens hosted the 2004 Summer Olympics — almost double the initial budget. It was the most expensive Olympics at the time and helped bring about the country's financial crisis in 2007-2008. Qatar’s strategy for avoiding this has been to downsize aggressively once the World Cup is over, offering the redundant structures, amounting to about 170,000 seats, to poorer countries looking to improve their sporting infrastructure. The technology behind the cooling systems developed for seven of the eight stadiums has deliberately not been patented, allowing other countries and businesses to use it free of charge. Fair enough really.
