Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Group A Begins

All eyes are glued to Eurosport here in France as the tournament has now officially begun, and two completely different games were on display in the opening night.

The players watched most of the Netherlands/Japan match up - they had to take a break for dinner. Both teams came with their U-23 teams, and Japan has 11 players on their roster who were part of the squads successful Olympic qualifying campaign. Tadamari Lee scored the game's only goal on a rainy night, giving Japan at least temporary control of Group A in Toulon.

In a wide open affair, France started off strong in the second game of the night, taking an early two-goal lead over Chile. But Chile battled back and scored three pretty late goals to wake the 5-3 win over the hosts, who went down to 10 men in the second half.

All the games of the tournament are being broadcast here in French, but as we've mentioned before, football is the players' universal language.

1 comment:

Gil said...

I saw the France-Chile game on Fox soccer Channel. It was an entertaining game, but I was surprised by the manner in which the French side completely fell apart even if the team was playing with ten men for most of the second half. Very uncharacteristic for a French team at any level. Have a good game tomorrow. I'll be watching.