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Comment by WorkerBee | Hacker News Reader

It seems as though every game I read about, including Germany-England and Argentina-Mexico yesterday, is decided by a lucky goal or a wrongly-allowed goal or a wrongly-disallowed goal.

Except that it wasn't. Germany 4, England 1. The wrongly-disallowed goal would have given England 2.

And Argentina 3, Mexico 1.

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But the goals in question happened at critical stages of the game. England would have tied 2-2 and Mexico was tied but playing better than Argentina.

When your only option is to win, you have to open up your game, and your defence becomes vunerable. You can't know what would've happened, but you can't deny that these mistakes altered the dynamics of the games.

I would still say, though, that the better side won in each match.

That's a cop-out. Saying "they would have won anyway" doesn't help the fact that both England and Mexico got ripped off completely, and it was completely preventable.

Psychological effect of having the first goal affects future performance.

Except if you were French during the '90s, they had a tradition of the opposing team scoring first, and then the French team would rally and play way better. Well, not anymore, unfortunately.

Except that if you watched the game, Mexico turned into a completely different team after that goal. It's hard to put your focus back to the game after such an obvious miss by the referee. While Argentina was clearly the better team, had the ref made the correct call and noticed the offsides, who knows, it could be a completely different game.

Even beyond the psychological effect, goals affect strategy.

In an elimination match, when you go a point down, you NEED THAT POINT. You have to start playing a more aggressive formation - you've gotta have Everyone on offense. Because of that, any break by the other team is suddenly FAR more dangerous, which is why the momentum went as badly as it did.

Generally, I agree that GER was better than ENG and I liked ARG better than MEX, but they weren't THAT much better.

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