2008 Olympics: Final Drama

It took a few days to have some truly entertaining Olympic coverage that was actually live, that I didn't ruin for myself by opening my Yahoo! homepage and seeing the results before they aired on television. As it turns out, there was drama to be had on the soccer pitch, especially within the men's bracket.

The women's semifinal matches on Monday featured some very interesting similarities. In the first match, Brazil took on Germany, and it didn't look good for Brazil early on. Germany hung with the favored Brazilian team, even scoring first at the ten minute mark. It was all downhill from there, however, as Brazil got a goal from defender Formiga in the 43rd minute to tie the game headed into the half, then added three second half goals from Marta and Cristiane to charge to a 4-1 victory.

The second womens' semifinal was a very similar story, as Japan played hard early and scored the first goal of the game in the 16th minute. The US women soon found their game, however, tallying two goals in the last five minutes of the first half on their way to an easy 4-2 victory.

Brazil's womens team is a clear favorite over a US team that is playing in their fourth gold medal game in the four Olympic games since the sport was added. However, they now face additional pressure after the way the mens' semifinal matches unfolded today.

In the first game, Nigeria faced a Belgian team that was believed to have a bit of an edge, having pulled off the impressive feat of playing a man down for 70-plus minutes against Italy and still coming away with a 3-2 victory. However, instead of giving them momentum, it was apparent early on that the match against Italy merely sucked all the passion from Belgium's game.

Nigeria's Olubayo Adefemi scored the first goal of the game early on, to give Nigeria a 1-0 lead that it still held at the half, but the game was not nearly so close. Nigeria missed several excellent opportunities to put the ball in the goal, and it appeared to be a matter of time before Belgium would finally crack under the pressure of Nigeria's speed and ball handling.

That feeling proved accurate, as the Belgian defense gradually fell apart in the second half, resulting in a 4-1 final score that was numerous close moments away from being much, much worse.

Article Author: Geeves

Geeves is mainly a critic of the sports and entertainment arena, recently shifting his time and resources away from his own middling blogs and into the Blogcritics realm at something resembling full time.

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