Hello and welcome to the total soccer show. My name is Daryl Grove and I'm joined by a man who loves that knockout round drama. His name is Taylor Rockwell. Hello. Hello, my friend. I do indeed. So the round of 16 in the Women's World Cup is, it's not just upon us, it's halfway through. We have four games to review on today's show. What's been the most dramatic so far? What's delivered the most

knockout punch for the money? I mean, I think the most dramatic would be England Cameroon, but maybe not for like on the field, like quality of play reasons. This means we're going to have to talk about VAR later. Oh, 100% we are because my view has changed a little bit, not entirely, but I have some thoughts on VAR.

I think the most dramatic game, like, in terms of the result and the actual play, was maybe Norway, Australia, or maybe France and who did France beat today? France Brazil, there we go, thank you. Please pick one. I'm going to go Norway, Australia. It goes to penalties.

There's some VAR in there.

There's a red card.

And then it's an upset.

But it's kind of an upset that I think people felt was coming.

It also felt to me like the first proper dramatic knock-out game because Germany really took

care of Nigeria pretty fast, right?

It was 2-0 pretty quickly.

I was watching it.

I was like, oh, no, the drama's gone.

Yeah, pretty much. Do you want to start there? Yeah, let's start with Germany, Nigeria. In the 20th minute, it's an Alexandra Pop header from a corner. It's weirdly predictable. You could have guessed that Alexander Pop would be scoring headers from corners in the knockout rounds. See, but the thing there is that if you can guess it, then it probably should have been a thing that people were defending against.

Yeah.

And Nigeria kind of weren't. from corners in the knockout rounds. See, but the thing there is that if you can guess it, then it probably should have been a thing that people were defending against.

Yeah.

And Nigeria kind of weren't.

Well, let's talk about Nigeria's defending then. I would argue that they're defending in a zone, but the zone didn't quite attack the ball enough. Yes. I think that's 100% true. Right? And then if you defend in a zone, you're not marking the player.

And that's why, basically, when you watch this goal,

it looks like, oh, nobody's marking it.

It's the classic, like, failure of zonal marking leads people to think it's a failure of man marking. Yes, yes, it is. And that's what people think. But it's also the case that when I first watch this, and this is where Daryl, the nuances of zonal marking is Daryrell's expertise. Because when I first watched this,

it looked for a moment like Nigeria switched off because there's some players who do try to track Pop a little bit. Yeah. But Darrell makes the point that, no, that's just them being like, oh no, wait, she's leaving my zone and I can't track her anymore. That's the problem, right? And it is the short like the kind of negative side of the zonal.

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