Liverpool FC Forum

Sabre wrote:According to a tv commentator "The British always have been good, but they've come back stronger to these Olympics. It has ben the best performance in their history, on front of other great countries like Germany and France".

Is that true? have you got most medals than ever? Congratulations. I think that being fourth is pretty impressive. I mean China had 230.000.000 audience watching their table tennis final (true!). USA have over 200.000.000 people. Russia is huge aswell and always have been pretty good in a lot of disciplines. From here it seems a tremendous success what you have achieved!! and you were giving a lot of stick the first week!

dawson99 wrote:brilliant, the elegance of the olympics in beijing then on the crossover we turn up with a bus and leona lewis

RUSHIE#9 wrote:You just know that after such a successful and entertaining Olympics in Beijing the London effort is gonna be totally cack!!

Beijing have had the futuristic and unusual Birds Nest stadium:


London is going to have:

A shitty off the shelf bowl.

With the way this country is going with the PC brigade taking over we're gonna have events dropped for being too dangerous or discriminating against groups of people.

Sabre wrote:Thanks Conn. I don't want Joe gets me wrong, I do think USA are the better team and were better. When we closed up 2 points down, the inevitable 3 pointers from Kobe or Wade came.

But I think it would be fair for the future to set up some FIBA rules in the olympics. You could see many travelling fouls (4 steps) in the americans, but that's allowed there and has been allowed here.

I'm just happy we gave them a match, because yesterday I saw the game of Los Angeles 84 and I realised how much the european basket has improved. Back then we were battered 96-51 or something like that. That university guys were Jordan, Pat Ewing, Chris Mullin and great stars, but those great player at 19, were less of a team than the current USA profesional team in the olympics. Only Barcelona 92 team, with the players you mention plus Pippen was better IMHO

As for the attitude, well, Barkley was a guy that liked some rows aswell eh?   I really remember some glory moments of him... but he was loved more aswell, those Lebron James are a different kind of arrogance.

Sabre wrote:The main difference of travelling rules are the "pasos de salida" or "start travelling", which I don't know how is in english, but when you get the ball, as you know you can rotate over one leg without bouncing, while the other leg is in the air. The difference is that in the NBA you're allowed to make one pure step after that without bouncing the ball and in FIBA rules you cannot do that, you must start bouncing inmediatly.

Obviously the FIBA rules are better for the defender. If the NBA rules are applied, the American players will take more advantage of it, as their athleticism is absolutely brilliant.

I know that changing that for the americans is very difficult, it's a whole life playing that way. I was annoyed with the refs, because that precise refs, are refs that are very meticulous in the Euro League, meaning, they simply were overlooking the FIBA rule.

Another annoying thing is that in Europe, defending with the hands is not allowed. You can stand in your position, but you can't use the hands to push if you don't want to make a personal foul. I don't mind that a more aggressive line of measuring things, but as you mention, the refs didn't know to set a fixed criteria along the match. I think that both teams could perfectly complain about the refs.

But, leaving all this aside Joe, you can be very proud of your lot. They faced adversity, and they showed to me that they're a true team with pride, not only quality. You can be very proud this time of your basketball team, me thinks. I actually think that it was good for your basketball to face a tough final, IMHO the victories are sweeter than if it was a >30 points difference.

American players grow up at the junior, high school, and college level (21 years old) playing with the international travelling rule. Its only when they get to the NBA that they are allowed to take that extra step.

This was a very unique team in the history of American basketball. Before we didn't really have a national program. It might as well have been a popularity contest between the fans of the NBA putting together their favorite players a week before a tournament. But once that wasn't good enough anymore, we hired coach K (most successful active college coach) and he required a 3 year commitment from 40 players to train together and learn the international game. If you could not commit to the full 3 years of training, you were not considered for selection. From this pool we chose our final olympic roster which I had several disagreements with (Kidd, Redd, Williams, Prince, Boozer).

Although we did not adapt fully to the international style of play, we did find a way to adjust the American way of playing to work successfully in the international game. Before the gold medal game, this meant playing very aggressive defense, using our depth advantage, and our quickness to "slash" to the basket. We certainly lost something in our defense against Spain in the 2nd game, although we were able to get some easy points off of steals by reading the Spanish passes.

Some NBA commentators were saying after the game that it was the greatest in interntional basketball history. This seems to be quite a statement from people who most likely have only seen the dream team have 50 point wins, but I would agree with Sabre that it is more of an accomplishment for Spain than winning the World Championships 2 years ago. We fully committed our best players to winning these olympic games, and in the gold medal game we were only up by 4 with 2 minutes to go, and Calderon didn't even play, and Rubio is only 17!  I thought that Navarro played great and I am sad that he is going back to Barca after only one season in America (which was successful for him on a personal level).  I think it will be very interesting in a few years time to see if Kobe decides to play for Barca (who he has admitted is his favorite club despite playing footie for AC Milan when he was younger).  I don't know what the typical basketball salaries are like in Spain, but I am sure Kobe would be the highest paid player in history if he were to go there, and if the Euro continues to gain on the dollar and the NBA keeps restricing the maximum salary for its players, it might make more financial sense for Kobe to play in Spain. His jersey sales would be through the roof. If both him and Lebron went overseas I don't think we would be far away from seeing a true global basketball club league. Or at least a trans-atlantic one.

One thing that is interesting to me is MLB. I saw this peice on tele about how they are investing millions of dollars in trying to teach the chinese how to play baseball, and sending over yankees hats and stuff. There was instant recognition of the NY symbol, but none of them had any idea of what baseball was     Seems quite hypocritical to me to see baseball claiming that it wants to spread the game interntionally, and yet they do not release their top players to play in the olympics. Now because of that, baseball got pulled from the program. Its going to be much harder to grow as an international sport when your sport is not at the greatest international sporting event on the planet, and nearly everybody else's is there. I think that football is probably the only sport on the planet right now that can afford to get away with not sending its greatest stars to compete on the grandest stage. 1) The World Cup is probably the closest thing to the olympics on the planet 2) club football is bigger than any other club sport in the world, and there is an unfortunate overlap with the olympics.