Round ball code talk

[RussellEbertHandball]

Russia scores the opening goal after 12 minutes. And Putin offers the sheikh his hand in commiserations or celebrations with that smirk on his face.

 

[CharlieKelly]

Russia scores the opening goal after 12 minutes. And Putin offers the sheikh his hand in commiserations or celebrations with that smirk on his face.

New Gazprom contract in Saudi?

 

[CharlieKelly]

Had to pay $15 for Optus Sports tonight to be able to watch every World Cup game

This wouldn't have happened if Les Murray was still alive

 

[edgie]

Robbie has finished now AC/DC's Thunderstruck firing up the crowd including small contingent of Saudi fans.

They should have played Moneytalks, given the novelty money shot in to the crowd at their Moscow gig was accepted for real currency during the fall of the soviet union.

Sent from mTalk

 

[CharlieKelly]

The 2026 World Cup will be a 48 team tournament

PROS: It'd feature teams like Italy, Netherlands and Chile

CONS: It'd feature teams worse than Saudi Arabia

 

[CharlieKelly]

Saudi will beheading home after the group stage....

 

[GremioPower]

The 2026 World Cup will be a 48 team tournament

PROS: It'd feature teams like Italy, Netherlands and Chile

2018 World Cup Group of Death:
Chile
Italy
Netherlands
USA

CONS: It'd feature teams worse than Saudi Arabia

How could you finish below the Saudis in the Qualifiers?!

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

Had to pay $15 for Optus Sports tonight to be able to watch every World Cup game

This wouldn't have happened if Les Murray was still alive

Is that a channel on Foxtel or for the app? If the app where can you watch the game other than your phone? Laptop/desktop? Can you buy an adaptor cord to run it from your phone to TV?

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

This wouldn't have happened if Les Murray was still alive

My intial thought was nah Les wouldn't have stopped this, but the more I think about it, SBS won the rights years ago and only last year decided to on sell most of the games to Optus in a deal to split the costs and not have the production hassles of sending over bigger production teams. They lost big money in Rio.

This way SBS and Optus just take the UK TV feeds and other English speaking feed or pictures from the host broadcaster and have a team in Sydney call the game off the screen like 7 has done at the Olympics.

You are right. This wouldn't have happened if Les was still around and in charge of the SBS production team.

 

[Garibaldi Red]

Is that a channel on Foxtel or for the app? If the app where can you watch the game other than your phone? Laptop/desktop? Can you buy an adaptor cord to run it from your phone to TV?

It’s the Optus Sports App. Luckily my daughter has an Optus account so I am using her details. Watched a fair bit of the first half last night but fell asleep. Woke up when my wife took the iPad out of my hands.

 

[CharlieKelly]

Is that a channel on Foxtel or for the app? If the app where can you watch the game other than your phone? Laptop/desktop? Can you buy an adaptor cord to run it from your phone to TV?

It's a whole separate pay-TV provider, they somehow managed to acquire the EPL rights too. Who knew there was more than just Foxtel?

I'm not with Optus, so I signed up via the Optus Sports app on my iPad, I also happen to have a HDMI port for my iPad, worked like a charm.

 

[CharlieKelly]

My intial thought was nah Les wouldn't have stopped this, but the more I think about it, SBS won the rights years ago and only last year decided to on sell most of the games to Optus in a deal to split the costs and not have the production hassles of sending over bigger production teams. They lost big money in Rio.

This way SBS and Optus just take the UK TV feeds and other English speaking feed or pictures from the host broadcaster and have a team in Sydney call the game off the screen like 7 has done at the Olympics.

You are right. This wouldn't have happened if Les was still around and in charge of the SBS production team.

After the debacle in 2002 when Channel 9 broadcast some World Cup games, Les vowed it wouldn't happen again

 

[TeeKray]

How could you finish below the Saudis in the Qualifiers?!

We were a bit like Port in the qualifiers - lots of play but lacked polish and class to finish off our work. Lots of draws, including a disgraceful performance where we were lucky to draw against Thailand.

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

The 2026 World Cup will be a 48 team tournament

PROS: It'd feature teams like Italy, Netherlands and Chile

CONS: It'd feature teams worse than Saudi Arabia

UEFA has 55 nations and in the 32 team comp, they get 13 teams + host nation so every 2nd or 3rd WC = 14 teams

They should get 20-24 teams in 48 team comp. I reckon they will look at 6 to CONCACAF, 5 to South America, 1 Oceania, 8 Africa and 8 Asia = 28 + 20 to UEFA with no intercontinental play offs. They might go 6 for Africa and 6 for Asia, but FIFA are keen on getting China into the World cup, and keep a 7th spot for intercontinental play offs

Top 48 ranked UEFA teams not at Russia. Could be a chance for Wales and Scotland to get back to the WC.

17 Netherlands
18 Wales
19 Italy
26 Austria
28 Slovakia
29 Northern Ireland
30 Romania
31 Republic of Ireland
35 Ukraine
38 Turkey
40 Bosnia and Herzegovina
42 Scotland
43 Montenegro
44 Greece
46 Czech Republic


At Russia - Rankings have jumped a bit for some of these teams since September - November last year when final lot of Qualifiers were played, and they have played friendlies and no qualifiers haven't played. Eg Iran were 34 and Oz 43 for 16 October rankings, Iran autoqualified and now its Iran 37, Oz 36.

1 Germany
3 Belgium
4 Portugal
6 Switzerland
7 France
8 Poland
10 Spain
12 Denmark
12 England
20 Croatia
22 Iceland
24 Sweden
34 Serbia
70 Russia

If the next WC is 22 slots for UEFA it could go to 11 groups of 5 and top 2 teams automatically qualify, or stay with 9 groups, 1 group has 7 instead of 6 teams, top 2 teams auto qualify and 8 of the 9 best 3rd placed teams play off home and away for the final 4 spots, to keep that October/November high tension final qualify games like they do for the last 6 WC's or so where its been top 9 teams qualify and 8 of 9 2nd best teams play off for the final 4 spots.

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

It's a whole separate pay-TV provider, they somehow managed to acquire the EPL rights too. Who knew there was more than just Foxtel?

I'm not with Optus, so I signed up via the Optus Sports app on my iPad, I also happen to have a HDMI port for my iPad, worked like a charm.

Yeah I remember the article where it was announced Optus would let SBS show 1 EPL game a week live for 5 years or however long Optus won the rights for, plus have a highlights show and the trade off was Optus got rights for the world cup. See if I can find the announcement.

Optus used to have a pay TV service called Optus Vision. I floated between SE Qld and Sydney in 1997 and got sick of asking my sister for videos of Port games in 1997 as we were barely on TV up north after the first few games. So I got Optus TV in 1998 as channel 7 had their C7 24 hour sports channel which guaranteed at least 6 games a week live between C7 and Ch 7 and other 2 or less were replayed in full on delay and all 8 games were replayed. I had Optus Vision between 1998-2002 before I moved up to the Gold Coast in 2003 and got Fox Footy Channel on Austar. At some point they singed a product sharing deal with Foxtel and Austar around 2007 and then years later must have given up and gave all their Pay TV customers to Foxtel.

 

[mic59]

Saudi will beheading home after the group stage....

I assume that was NOT a mistake in leaving out the space between be and heading. Wouldn't be the first time a World Cup performance has had fatal repercussions though. Remember that Colombian who scored an own goal a while ago?

 

[Holden Hillbilly]

He Saudis are the world's worst WC team. Every time they make it they fail to score.

With the WC expanding to 48 teams in 2026 (and Asia will likely get 2-4 of the 16 extra slots) they will likely be there regularly unless China & others improve a lot.

 

[Garibaldi Red]

I assume that was NOT a mistake in leaving out the space between be and heading. Wouldn't be the first time a World Cup performance has had fatal repercussions though. Remember that Colombian who scored an own goal a while ago?

Andres Escobar. There is a good ESPN 30 for 30 documentary called The Two Escobars which is worth a look if you get a chance.

 

[mic59]

Andres Escobar. There is a good ESPN 30 for 30 documentary called The Two Escobars which is worth a look if you get a chance.

Seen it but I might have another look. It's on youtube (otherwise in full or chapters)

 

[CharlieKelly]

Egypt vs. U-R-gay about to start

Don't bite anyone Suarez

 

[CharlieKelly]

There's a LOT of empty seats at this game, this is the World Cup, shouldn't every game be sold out and full?

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

There's a LOT of empty seats at this game, this is the World Cup, shouldn't every game be sold out and full?

If it was in the major western Euro countries you would get 25+k there. lots of Egyptians would get the weekend flight. The questions has to be asked, where the **** in the world is (Y)Ekaterinburg? It's 2,000 km east of Moscow. The locals obviously aren't that interested.

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

There's a LOT of empty seats at this game, this is the World Cup, shouldn't every game be sold out and full?

As a comparison, Bosnia's population is about 3.5m as is Uruguay's. Nigeria's is about 195m and Egypt's is about 95m. When Bosnia played Nigeria in Brazil in Cuiaba in 2014, which the population is about 900k as opposed to (Y)Ekaterinburg's 1.7m, crowd was 40,499 in stadium whose capacity was 41,112.

Bosnia V Iran (pop 80m) in the city of Salvador (pop 3m) crowd was 48,011 stadium capacity of 51,708.

It's Russia!! People dont want to travel there in large numbers, its not that great a place to visit, the people there are poor, and football isn't that big a passion. Ice Hockey is probably the big game in the middle of Russia.

 

[Grave Danger]

The questions has to be asked, where the **** in the world is (Y)Ekaterinburg? It's 2,000 km west of Moscow. The locals obviously aren't that interested.

That would put it pretty near Copenhagen

 

[GranFormaggi]

Yeah I remember the article where it was announced Optus would let SBS show 1 EPL game a week live for 5 years or however long Optus won the rights for, plus have a highlights show and the trade off was Optus got rights for the world cup. See if I can find the announcement.

Optus used to have a pay TV service called Optus Vision. I floated between SE Qld and Sydney in 1997 and got sick of asking my sister for videos of Port games in 1997 as we were barely on TV up north after the first few games. So I got Optus TV in 1998 as channel 7 had their C7 24 hour sports channel which guaranteed at least 6 games a week live between C7 and Ch 7 and other 2 or less were replayed in full on delay and all 8 games were replayed. I had Optus Vision between 1998-2002 before I moved up to the Gold Coast in 2003 and got Fox Footy Channel on Austar. At some point they singed a product sharing deal with Foxtel and Austar around 2007 and then years later must have given up and gave all their Pay TV customers to Foxtel.

At one point you could bravely head in to the settings and configure your set top box to pick up the Optus Vision stations by changing the frequencies. There was always some trepidation that Foxtel would not come back and require an embarrasing phone call.