Colombia v Portugal: World Cup 2026 – live

The tale of the long throw-ins has attracted quite a bit of mail:

George Meikle:

I was lucky enough to play rec soccer in a FIFA men’s league (you pay, you get to play but FIFA admin which included player id cards which was good) in Indianapolis in the early 1980s. Everybody used long throws – this league had some well set up clubs organized around diasporas: the German club, the English, Mexico, we were Yanks, and a couple more. The well established clubs – Germany, England, Mexico – had tiers of developing players they used, while we were just middle class professionals, mostly engineers, who like football. Round kind. But those clubs with a history showed us real tactics up close, like pressing, long throws etc.

Joshua Reynolds:

Rory Delap: still the undisputed GOAT of the long throw? I say, yes.

David Dyte:

That’s patently insane, even aside from the fact that the coach seems to think long throw ins don’t exist at the pro level. At the D1 level, you aren’t coaching to win? At what point can players think about winning the game? I get this with five year olds, but come on. I’d love to see the reaction if Nick Saban said he’d only ever been worried about development and that winning was secondary.

“Development over winning” went to such extremes in the USA (in rhetoric, anyway, but not in practice) that a U-19 rec league commissioner talked about the importance of developing players. For what? Intramural soccer in college?

(Apologies if none of this makes sense to an international audience. College soccer? What?)