betiko wrote:Yes, kallstrom is far from his best years, i don t know how he has been doing, i know he wasn t playing much for lyon when they sold him to arsenal, and that he got a bad injury just a few days after signing for arsenal. Good deal for lyon!
Elmander is now old but he has been good. He isn t a scorer, he is there more to weight on the defense and to leave spaces for the other forward, in that case zlatan. He did a very good job in that role for toulouse and for bolton.
Ola Thoivonen has actually impressed me. He signed for Rennes last winter from PSV eindoven without making too much noise. (The owner of Rennes is actually a french billionaire, husband of salma hayek but he doesn t spend a lot in his team). Rennes is probably the less consistent club in france, they are very unpredictable and will win against big teams then lose cup finals against shit teams. Anyway, Thoivonen has played 5 month for rennes so far and has scored at least 8 goals including some really beautiful ones. I was surprised that a guy arriving in winter could adapt and blend in a new team (that isn t very good and inconsistent) so quickly. Anyway, let s see next season how thoivonen responds, but his first half season in france has been very promissing.
Anyway, overall sweden has a world class superstar and all other players are very average. You guys better come up with some young talents soon if you don t want your national team to disapear from the football map for over a decade..
It probably will, not much a fan can do about it so i don't worry too much. At least we still have hockey, we've hardly ever been as good at hockey as we are now and hardly ever been as bad at Football, I don't think it's a coincidence. There's a lot of money to be made in Ice Hockey in North America, it's not uncommon for many kids to play both hockey and football in Sweden when they're young, but if they're good they have to make a choice, what are they going to focus on? There's no competition for talent like that in Portugal. If you want to make money for a living in a team sport there's only one, football. When Sweden started sending their best hockey players to North America to play over there, our hockey team has become better, and our football team has deteriorated. It's not an all bad thing though, hockey is an amazingly fun sport to watch and we could never be one of the very best teams in footbal anyway, but in hockey we can, and we are, lol.
Look for Swedish football to meet a similar fate as Hungaryan football, Hungary used to be a strong football nation but hasn't been so in decades. Sweden's time as a country that regularly qualifies to the WC is over I think. We might make it there every ones in a while, once every 20 years perhaps, but it's not going to be like it used to be. We're not good enough anymore quite simply. MAny countries focus on football to an extreme extent, Sweden doesn't.
