With memories of the golden years (80's) of the albanian football still fresh on her mind, Albania is now attempting to recreate its strong football legacy. As young players start making their names abroad, the future is looking bright for Albanian football!
Aurora Bulkualis wrote:Iceland has a population of 300k, and worse squad than us, yet when it mattered they showed up, and didn't choke.
If only you knew how much money there's been invested in football infrastructure in Iceland you'd be amazed. There's a synthetic field everywhere you go. I was there some years ago, and these fields were everywhere. And now that investment in infrastructure is paying off.
We don't even live on a fucking volcanic rock and we have grass, but there's no infrastructure, no investments and no plans for the future. We rely on players produced in other countries.
What are you going on about? Our team is the same if not better than Iceland's. Who cares who produced what? We choked, they didn't. And they had like 10% of their population in France, but they handled pressure better.
You guys keep making excuses to make yourself feel better, but the reality is what it is. No one is saying the campaign was a TOTAL failure, but it was largely so. It's pathetic how neither the coach or most players have balls. I'm not saying to not enjoy this, as it is a historic moment, but don't turn this into some footballing success, because it's rather sad.
"Cheap things you can buy in bulk, but Bulku is priceless" Ervin Xhevahir Bulku
I'm on about that if you want an attacking team where there's talent in every position, you'll have to invest in football infrastructure and not rely on other countries to produce players for you.
Choked? Man get out of here wit that bs. We're out because of mathematics. We were close to going through and we didn't boo-fucking-hoo. We did good.
It's easy to talk about having balls from Canada or where ever the f*** you are, while the players busted their ass trying to get results. We're simply not better than what we accomplished. With a bit of luck we would have went through. With a bit of luck, Gashi would have scored that goal against Switzerland, and Ajeti wouldn't have had to be subbed against France and we'd have five points and not three. But thing is, we didn't have that luck. You're commenting as if you haven't seen the games - we've not bunkered and been pussies in those three games. Quite contrary, we've been very direct in our play, although we've been defensive, but I don't see a problem with that at all. Iceland & Northern Ireland have both been bunkering much more than us, but they've gone trough to the next round, because they had that bit of luck which is always needed.
So nobody's making excuses. We're just being realistic. This tournament isn't even close to have been a failure. There are negatives, of course, but those are outweighed heavily by the positives. We're progressing as a NT and that gives me a lot of hope for the future.
Exactly, if anything it's a "losers mentality" to think the way AB is thinking. We definitely could have done better but we got eliminated by one goal... This isn't even the best team we have, these are just the players GDB wanted to pay respect to. I know we have a deadly group for the WC qualifiers, but why not shock everyone and qualify anyway?
This is NOT our last tournament..
Also don't get mad at our players that Edi Rama is trying to use them as a political platform. That crook is either getting thrown out of office or arrested by the FBI hopefully next year.
Also, at the end of the day even countries like NIR, and Iceland simply look better than the team we assembled. NIR beat Ukraine 2-0, we lost to the same team 3-1. Iceland beat Austria 2-1, which is the score line Austria beat us by. Even Ireland beat Italy..
The point is if we wanted to advance we simply had to get a point off of the big 2 i.e. France/Swiss. However the fact that we showed we're a superior side to a Romania that we haven't beat since 1948 says enough about the progress we've made. This isn't the end...