Mister Legend

Chapter 488 The first show after 41 years
Starting from the first national team match day in September 2018, UEFA's well-planned European Nations League will officially appear in front of the public.The main reason for the birth of this event is to make the world rankings of each national team more reasonable, and to prevent second-rate teams such as Poland and Switzerland from occupying the top ten positions all the year round, which will easily lead to unfair groupings in the World Series The phenomenon.

This event will be held every two years, replacing most of the original national team football friendly matches, making the two sides of the game even more evenly matched. While attracting more fans' attention, it also includes the previous World Series qualifiers The role of the first competition will produce 4 places to directly advance to the 2020 European Cup finals.

According to the rules issued by Qianxing, the 55 members belonging to UEFA will divide the current world ranking into four levels, forming a stepped league similar to the relegation system. The group leaders of League B, League C and League D will be promoted, and correspondingly, the last place in each group will be relegated.And the group top spot in each league will guarantee a place in the play-offs for the second stage of Euro 2020.

Taking the A-level national league as an example, the four groups are Germany, France, and the Netherlands in Group A; Belgium, Switzerland, and Iceland in Group B; Portugal, Italy, and Poland in Group C; and Spain, England, and Croatia in Group D. Each group will play two rounds of home and away games in a double cycle, and finally rank first, second and third in their respective groups.

The winners of the four groups will advance to the finals of the UEFA Nations League, which will be held in the summer of 2019 in the form of the World Cup semi-finals, and the champion of this UEFA Nations League will be finally determined (of course, only the A-level champions will known as the winner of the entire tournament).The final champions of the four levels will all get a direct ticket to the 2020 European Cup, which can be regarded as providing these teams with an opportunity outside of the normal qualifiers.

For strong teams like Italy and the Netherlands, which have just suffered from the shadow of the World Cup qualifiers, they will still attach great importance to this new competition, and the rest of the teams such as Germany, France, Spain and England will not deal with it hastily. After all, it would be an extremely embarrassing thing to be downgraded to B-level, and no one wants to be the laughing stock of the outside world.

Therefore, in the new national team rosters after the Russia World Cup announced at the end of August, almost all the teams formed their own strongest lineups. Ling players finally got the chance to play for the country.

Ranocchia, Barreca, Baselli, Belotti and Immobile for Italy; Andre Gomes and Bruno Fernandez for Portugal; Glick for Poland; Vukocevi for Montenegro Oddly enough, the Red Bulls contributed a total of nine international footballers during this national team match day, and eight of them will participate in the A-level national league.This number is naturally not comparable to Juventus, whose entire team is international, and it is also behind Roma and Naples, but it is similar to Inter Milan (only counting players from European countries). This is the first time in the past 20 years.

Moreover, the Red Bull team also has Savage Jr., Issa Diop, Askacivar, Pellegri and Johannes Eggstein, who are considered by the outside world to be selected for the national team in the future. He is a young talent, so he still received enthusiastic attention from the media and fans for a while, making the already extremely hot city of Turin even more noisy.

However, Li Moody has not been in a good mood these days. Every fan must be aware of the mutual grievances between the national team and the club over the use of players.Due to the lack of professional care and the influence of the spirit of playing for the country, the chances of players being injured in the national team game are much higher than when they were in the club. Although there is a compensation mechanism from FIFA, let’s not talk about the money Can it make up for the loss of players who have been absent for a long time? Even if a large sum of euros is given, it will not solve the problem of the club team losing an important rotation or even the main core.

So in the next week, the Turin coach, like his colleagues, has been praying for his players in his heart, hoping that they can come back safely, and the Italian home courts that kicked off on the evenings of the 7th and 10th respectively The two games against Poland and the away game against Portugal require even more attention.

These two games are the third and fourth games of the new coach of the Azzurri Mancini after he took office. Before that, under the leadership of the former Inter Milan coach, the team played a friendly match with France and the Netherlands respectively. , but the result of 1 loss and 1 tie obviously cannot satisfy the majority of Italian fans.After Buffon, Chiellini and other veterans who have set the core of Haishenzhen withdraw from the national team, only two veterans over 30 years old, Sirigu and Bonucci, are in the new squad. Chiesa Jr., Mandela The addition of newcomers such as Gora and Bareca has further reduced the average age of the team, but correspondingly, it is naturally lacking in experience.

Therefore, in the warm-up match against the Netherlands, Mancini sent many players who did not have much experience in the national team in the starting lineup, such as Verdi, Cristante, Bonaventura and other fringe international players in the past. , hoping to let them grow up as soon as possible through actual combat.Belotti also appeared in the starting lineup, which means that he may still act as a substitute under the new coach.

Sure enough, Hong Beibei sat on the bench against the Polish team, which is known as the weakest group seed team in the World Cup in Russia, but his friend Immobile was not the starter because the latter was injured in training. The prayers of Moody Lee, who does not believe in God, seem to have had no positive effect.Fortunately, it's just a contusion on the right toe, and it can recover after about half a month's rest, otherwise the Turin coach would really dare to point at the national team and scold her.

However, Balotelli, who failed to find a new club as he wished, was forced to stay in Ligue 0, and became the laughing stock of the outside world again, was like sleepwalking in the game. Lost myself.Zaza and Chiesa Jr., who came off the bench in the second half, also failed to take advantage of the visiting team's defensive players led by Glick. Fortunately, Lewandowski's downturn has continued from the World Cup to the present, and both sides have shown attack. Fatigue weakness.In the end, the two teams drew a goalless draw and opened the curtain of this group with an extremely boring 0-[-].

Three days later, the Italian team, whose physical condition was weak, visited Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. Before the game, they were unanimously looked down upon by the outside world, relying on Belotti's header at the end of the game, they struggled to win a 1-vs. 1 draw.Although the result of only scoring two points in the two games is not very ideal, at least the hope of winning the top spot in the group is maintained. If they can win both games in the following games, they can still lock in the place for entering the A-level semi-finals. Then get the qualification to win the championship and directly qualify for the European Cup.

It's just that when these international footballers returned to the club one after another, the troubles brought to the latter's coaching staff were far more troublesome than the prospects of their respective national teams. I barely participated in the training, but I still need to take some risks if I want to participate in the competition three days later.

And this is the result after UEFA launched the national league plan. After all, the opponents are all countries within the continent. If they fly around the world like before, it will consume more physical energy for the players.

So after excluding some individuals who were injured or not in good physical condition, the Turin team set off for Genoa in the south on the morning of September 9th. They will challenge the club's No. 14 archenemy in an away game on Sunday afternoon. Sampdoria.

After experiencing highs and lows last season, Samp, nicknamed the Old Sailor, did not completely overthrow and rebuild as Li Moody had previously speculated. Although he could not resist the temptation of Arsenal's huge transfer fee, he sold midfielder Torreira. , and the striker star Schick was also bought out by the Roma team. In addition, the departure of the local goalkeeper Viviano and the free departure of the two Croatian fringe internationals Strinic and Budimir have all reduced the strength of the team's bench. .

However, after retaining the original main players such as Yankto and Platt, and introducing the Gambian international center back Kore and the Slovenian No. [-] national goal Belek, the team's skeleton has not disintegrated, and basically maintained the level of the same period last year. , so this opponent is not easy to deal with.

The process of the game also verified the prediction of the Turin coach. Although he bought out the loaned Colombian center Zapata from Naples and then loaned him to Atlanta, the young Polish international Kaunacki and With the rapid growth of Caprari, a short shadow forward from the Roma youth academy, coupled with the support of the veteran Quagliarella last season, Samp's offensive ability should not be underestimated.

In the whole game, the home team had a huge advantage of 18 to 10 in shooting data, and the ball possession rate also got 2% of the pick-ups, which can be said to have a considerable advantage.However, the Turin team played the best defensive counterattack tactics since the beginning of the new season. It was like copying the performance of the French and Belgian national teams in the World Cup. Fernandez and Boyer, who came off the bench, scored a goal.Despite a brilliant direct free-kick from Uruguayan Ramires, they held on to make it 1-[-] to bring home a win from the Luigi Ferraris Stadium.

The opening four-game winning streak is second only to last season's five-game winning streak, creating the second best opening performance of the Red Bulls in the past 30 years, and has become the subject of many Italian media reports.

However, the attention of Turin fans obviously deviated from the scope of the league temporarily in the middle of this week, because their team will start the second Champions League trip since the team was established. In 1976, the Red Bulls won their last Serie A title so far, so they qualified for the European Champions Cup for the first time in the following season.

It's a pity that the Champions League in that era had just experienced two three-peat dynasties of Ajax and Bayern Munich, and was about to usher in a period of six-year dominance by English teams. Off, this first show hastily ended.At the time, people didn't know that after the farewell to the Champions League, the Red Bulls had to wait a full 41 years before returning to the world's most influential club competition.

Although they were divided into a very competitive group, and the Turin team, which started as a seed player, also seriously lacked the experience of the Champions League, but with the example of winning the Europa League in a counterattack four months ago, it is inevitable that people will be confused. I have some inexplicable fantasies about the team coached by Li Mudi in my heart.Even after the lottery results came out, most of the media and gaming organizations were not very optimistic about the prospects of the Turin team, and many people even said that they might not even qualify for the group stage, but the people of Turin City But they all firmly believe that their team will definitely surprise the outside world.

On the evening of September 9, the two matches in the first round of Group E of the Champions League started as scheduled, one of which was played at the Olympic Stadium in Turin.As a result, the home team, which has less than 18 UEFA Champions League experience in total, defeated the visiting Russian Super League team Moscow with a huge score difference of 30 to 27958 amidst the cheers and cheers of 4 spectators. The Central Army team, that is, last year's victory over the league's champion team Lokomotiv in the European war, has brought new scars to the fighting nation.

In particular, the young Italian midfielder Barella, who was born in 1997, also scored a stunning super long shot from 36 meters in the game, which severely humiliated his performance in the just-concluded World Cup. In addition to the brave Russian goalkeeper Akinfeev, the BBC live broadcast commentator repeated "What a goal!" seven times in a row, which became one of the hot spots on the world's Internet for a while.

This victory made the Red Bulls taste the taste of winners in the Champions League for the second time in history. 41 years ago, their seniors had a record of 1 win, 2 draws and 1 loss in the four games they played. After nearly half a century, it was rewritten by a new generation of Torino players.

Of course, if the CSKA coach Goncharenko hadn't said after the game that he would "repay" the humiliation they suffered today at home, then the situation would be even more ideal.Because Moscow in December is extremely unfriendly to all human beings who are not fighting nations. Italians who have adapted to the Mediterranean climate go there, and it seems that there are not many other options except to be turned into popsicles. .

However, Li Mudi was still in a good mood. Taking advantage of the opportunity of the Youth Champions League being held one day earlier, he specially went to the scene to meet the Celestial Center Li Tenglong who played for the China Central Army Youth Team.Born in 2001, this Chinese-Russian mixed-race center has a potential value of 134 in the FM system, and his mental attributes are far higher than those of his peers in China. He has the best future development prospects among his group of Chinese players.

Li Modi, who found this young player when searching with scouting tools at the end of June, was so excited that he almost jumped up. He thought he had finally found a good seed worthy of his own training.Unfortunately, the follow-up progress was far more complicated than he imagined at the time.

(End of this chapter)