Wouldn't draw too many conclusions from that 1st game though: It's a rather young team, playing a world cup at home and the pressure must have been incredible for those guys. Imo it was quite obvious in the first 15-20min that they were affected by that, but then started to take control (until they looked a bit winded for the last 10min).
Croatia is better defensively than many give them credit for (weak goalie though) and therefore not the ideal matchup in that situation. Imo Brazil will look much better the further we get in this world cup and at the end of the day, group stage is just a warm-up, teams like BRA have to somehow survive and to find a rhythm.
Also not sure why everyone is so shocked about the outcome, even if you put all conspiracy theories aside, the home team has almost always been favored across most leagues/sports and in the world cup especially, just ask f.e. the Italians what they think about their knockout in the 2002 world cup in Korea against the home team (or the Spaniards, if that's not enough). 2006 in Germany it wasn't that blatant, but still existed.
There is just no way that they let Brazil get knocked out during group stage, even less let them lose (or tie) the opening match, when they desperately try to avoid fueling the publics disapproval of this world cup being held in Brazil...they even eliminated Dilmas/Blatters pregame speech from the agenda to avoid another PR disaster like the Confed Cup when the whole stadium whistled and told Dilma to shove it up her ass. Instead of the speech they decided yesterday morning to send out some kid with three white doves....and still the stadium told Dilma several times for minutes, to fuck off, just that the broadcast did its best to filter this out. Still happened though and videos all over facebook/youtube/twitter etc
Besides if the FIFA keeps insisting not to use European referees (who are used to that kind of stage and atmosphere due to them officiating champions league games or matches like Real/Barca, Dortmund/Bayern, or other high profile matches ...) on matches between European and non-European teams, it shouldn't surprise anybody that officials might be influenced by 50.000-60.000 fans going nuts for the home team.
So what are your bets for today?
I guess I'll go with:
Cameroon +0.25 +105, even though I didn't want to put any money on that team of mercenaries...but MEX looked out of sync and weak offensively in the last two preparation games after losing some key players to injury. Plus CAM is pretty good offensively
Netherlands not to score +120, not very convincing during prep games, offense is worse than 4 years ago, Spain always with great spacing and tough to score upon (lots of 1-0, 2-0 games), playing style by Spain makes this a A1 matchup for them imo and both teams could live with a (scoreless) tie.
Chile AHC -1 -110, must win for CHI if they want to advance, on paper Australia is one of the worst teams at this years wc and Chile needs to run up the score because it's rather likely that goal difference might become the deciding tiebreaker if they were able to tie against Spain or the Netherlands. Either way they should get ample scoring opportunities and unless they (like so often) need 4765 chances to score, they should win this game and should do so by more than 1 goal.
