Robert s

Germany only needs six goals in let's say 10 minutes.

That game is known here as "die Schande von Gijon", approx. "the disgrace of Gijon". There was one player on the Austrian side (Walter Schachner) who actively wanted to play. I have seen funny clips of 21 players basically doing nothing besided pass the ball back and forth and 1 player running around like wild and gesticulating to his teammates to pass him the ball. Though having both games run in parallel still from time to time produces let's call it funny results, like Denmark - Sweden at the Euro 2004 (beforehand it was clear that both teams would advance if the game ends in a tie with both teams scoring at least 2 goals and behold, the game ended 2-2) or France - Denmark at the World Cup 2018 (both teams were sure to advance with a draw and basically nothing happened for 90 minutes). Another famous game in that vein was a Champions League match between Leverkusen and Monaco I think in 1998. Monaco goalkeeper Barthez was so sure that nothing was going to happen in the last 10 minutes that he sat down, leaning his back at the goalpost.

I first wanted to reply with "<something> <something> Molenbeek <something>" but thought better of it. Well, this evening there have been riots in Brussels, public transportation was partially stopped, police asked the public to stay out of the city center.

Come on, those were just big ECW fans.

The attendance figures to the games are presented to you either by the Iraqi minister of information or a wrestling promotion. E.g. for Netherlands - Senegal: the capacity of the arena is 40.000, there were a lot of empty seats and the announced figure: 41.721

What's that on Mick's head? Did he paint his skull black?

Vince mentioned Foreman a couple of times on the last two Raws but I think that was more of a coincidence as I would think that the double switch was set in stone probably around Summerslam time (otherwise they could have kept the IC belt on Nash a bit longer, it's not as if Hall was more than a transitional champ here either). Though maybe they rushed Nash's turn a bit. Something that I forgot to mention in my first post: the steroid trial ended in early summer, WWF fell of a cliff in the second half of 94. Probably that's a coincidence, but still. I would not agree that the roster in late 94 was that weak. W.r.t. star power maybe, but there was enough there that better booking could have provided a good product. They had Bret and Owen Hart, Owen Hart, HBK, Hall, Nash, Waltman, Luger (who as already mentioned probably mentally quit after Mania X), Bigelow, Davey Boy, Undertaker, Yokozuna and Jarrett and a lot of people who could fill out the cards with decent matches and/or angles like Backlund, Bob Holly, the Smoking Gunns, Mabel, Fatu, Barbarian, Savio Vega, Lawler, ... That's not a bad roster if you use it wisely. And to be fair, the PPVs were still decent, they just had questionable booking left and right (on TV as well as the PPV layout).

I am currently fighting to get through the fall of 94 in my WWF rewatch. The booking at this point was so bad. On paper, the roster actually was pretty decent but they got the least out of it. The Survivor Series match that got the most buildup screentime was the freaking clowns vs. Lawler's team comedy match. Bret vs. Backlund got, after Backlund attacked Skaaland and the magazine guy, relatively little buildup. You would expect that they would try to give Backlund as many wins as possible on TV, but besides a Superstars win against Holly, there was a DQ loss against Luger (in a surprisingly decent match - Luger in 94 was not doing much for me) and a win against Waltman that was cut from the Network version (I guess they lost the original tape of that one). Yokozuna already feels like an afterthought - they started to build up IRS vs. Undertaker long before Survivor Series. Also the layout of Raw has become very formulaic, all shows have to have a King's Court. I am not much of a fan of Lawler's WWF heel persona anyway, having to deal with him on any show is tough. Starting with a 10 to 15 minute non-squash match is fine, but the matches they chose also left a lot to be desired.

"Let's make a little noise up in this building." "Welcome to the dog house."

I agree that Galadriel might be the weakpoint, though blaming it on Morfydd Clark alone might be too simple. The writing did not do her any favours and I am sure if she got better direction she could have performed better, more in line with what we conceive Galadriel should be like. Standing up to the performance to one of the best actresses of her generation is a huge task anyway, and Blanchett had much more to work with.

I got as much out of Odyssey as I wanted. I finished the main quest, a seizable amount of secondary quests (incl. getting rid of all cultists) and resolved all question marks on the islands and I would say about 2/3 on the mainland. At this point (well, you could say that you reach that point already 10 hours or so in), the game became too repetitve to investe any more time.

Okay, to be honest I just was checking some names from 80ies Portland set and somehow missed that Chris Colt died in the 90ies.

So he was the 1980 version of The Man of a Thousand and Four Holds? (with 502 armbars and 502 full nelsons) The match was decent enough, I guess, but he looks like a guy who would never make it beyond curtain-jerking.

I am not familiar with Mike Masters, but cagematch (with the obvious question how complete their Portland results are) says he wrestled in Portland for a couple of months in 81 and 90, so not someone who on paper has a lot to say. By the way: he has passed away a couple of months ago. Guys like Mike Miller, Col DeBeers, the Cuban Assassin, Chris Colt or Brett Sawyer would have had much more to say (depending on how well they are doing, of course).

Okay, if I had to choose between IE and Edge, I would choose Edge. Our IT department also tries to tell us that we should use Edge, but me (and the whole software development department) could not care less (which also might have to do with the fact that we are working a lot under Linux and are using open source software as much as possible). Basically everything works perfectly with Firefox except some shitty (Microsoft) Sharepoint plugins (somehow our IT department considers Sharepoint to be a good tool and again the developers boycott it as much as possible).