I am not going to be able to watch the second half, but this start has been brutally slow. I am watching in the US on Fox and the commentators have struggled to find things to talk about. At different points they have talked about the grounds crew, tea cups, and the Copa America instead of this game. If England has any hopes of making a run in this tournament, they are going to need to make some changes, up the tempo, and find some urgency.
Really lackadaisical start to this game so far. At least when England played Denmark they came out strong before they got lazy. This game they just started that way.
Overall, this game was kind of disappointing with relatively few good chances at goal from open play (especially compared to the other Group D match). The equalizer came from a penalty that will be sure to spark discussion going forward. At the end of the day, France looked their best when they were playing quickly and vertically. They struggled to generate chances when they couldn’t use their pace against the Polish defense. Lessons to take with them as they advance.
I can’t stand when penalty takers do those inconsistent runs up to the ball just to try to bait the keeper. Aren’t there rules about that kind of thing? Feel for the French keeper on this one.
Yeah, France has looked better in the second half. Attacking with pace that the Polish defense has struggled with.
At the half:
I tuned in about 10 minutes through the half once I grabbed some lunch. I have been watching France play through this tournament and they haven’t seemed like they particularly found their groove yet. At least, they seem a pale imitation of the French team that showed up in the World Cup. I had thought it was maybe due to Mbappe being sidelined so far. However, with him on the pitch this game, they have largely struggled to break through the Polish defense (until the last ~5 minutes or so).
There just hasn’t been too much movement off the ball for France, creating space for their play makers to work through the Polish defense. France has looked better on the fast break than when they try to build it up because they have struggled to get through the back line of Poland after they get their lines set up. There were a couple minutes there at the end of the half where France started playing some quick give and go’s and were able to spring some players behind the back line to make the Polish goalkeeper come up with some good reflex saves.
As for Poland, I think they should be fairly happy with their performance so far. They have mostly managed to contain some of the French play makers while having a couple good looks at goal on the break. Something to watch out for, and they almost got caught out, is that they don’t over commit forward and have things turn into a footrace toward their own goal after a turnover.
The French team of the last five minutes of the half looked way better than the rest of what I watched, so I think they should look to emulate those quick passes and through balls to try to break through Poland as their big, lofted crosses haven’t had shown too much promise yet.
Filterable post flairs and instance-agnostic links are my two biggest wish list items that I think would go a long way to making that specific community much nicer (speaking as a mod).
This is an excellent point that I thought about when a previous community I was active in got shut down on the ml instance due to some admin whims. Since then, for the two communities I run, I have an external wiki that I maintain with things like complete rules or an index of past weekly discussion threads, etc. These wikis are set up on a VPS that I am responsible for, independent of the host instance of my communities.
ani.social and the admin, @hitagi@ani.social, has been excellent, and the instance is a logical place for anime/manga communities. I have also tried to keep up donations to keep the server running, but people’s lives change, not always by choice. Having some form of communication independent of the lemmy instance makes sense for those scenarios, if for nothing else except for communicating a migration to a different instance.