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It's very hard to take this huge loss against Argentina, but you can not expect to beat one of the best teams in the world if you're having problems all the time.
The atmosphere in this team was very good, and many were absolutely delighted with what had happened to the so called, "Balkan mentality".
But then came the setbacks:
Mirko Vucinic got injured during a game against Germany in the Euro U-21 tournament in Portugal. He couldn't participate in this tournament and had to be replaced. Everyone thought it would be Aleksandar Lukovic, but Ilija Petkovic decided to take his son instead. Many in Serbia were very angry at this point, and called it scandalous. This also started a debate with a lot of experts saying that Dusan didn't deserve this place. But then when we played FC Kärnten in a friendly game, he scored a goal and everyone thought this would give a little calmer effect. But it didn't, and Dusan Petkovic decided to leave because he didn't want to ruin the atmosphere in the team. The players were upset because he left, but still the atmosphere in the team was "Good". We couldn't replace Petkovic because he wasn't injured, and this left us with a squad with 22 players, instaed of 23.
Before the World Cup started, Nemanja Vidic and Mateja Kezman had a duell where Nemanja injured Kezman on training. It didn't appear to be anything serious and Mateja started training a couple of days later. Savo Milosevic decided to take a discussion with Vidic about why he tackled Mateja like he did, and it all ended up good.
The setbacks continued while we played against the Nederlands, we lost the game 0-1 after a goal by Robben. The main factor why we lost it was because Petkovic started with Nenad Djordjevic who just couldn't mark Robben enough. Koroman was substituted and played well the whole game, Igor Duljaj had to play on Serbias right side and Vidic couldn't participate because of a red card in the qualifier against Bosnia & Herzegovina, in the last game.
Nemanja Vidic said that he would do everything for the Serbian team when he came back to play. But he never returned to play, he injured himself during a training session and couldn't participate anymore in this tournament. Very unlucky becuase he's one of our best players at the back. We didn't know how the starting line-up would look like now when Vidic injured himself.
Dejan Stankovic and Danijel Ljuboja started arguing because of something during a training session yesterday, the day before matchday. Savo Milosevic had to interrupt and talk to both of them after the training, The atmosphere was still "Good".
Match against Argentina today and I thought that we could make it even though we had a lot of problems in our squad. The announcements before the game was that Ivica Dragutinovic, one of the famous four was injured and couldn't participate. Milan Dudic got the chance to play, and did it quite well even though we lost. The game started and I didn't have any bigger expectations on this game anymore even though I was still cheering for "Plavi". The first couple of challenges reminded me of the Nederlands game where we were punished for every single challenge. This continued all game long, and the referee was very bad (But you can't blame him for this loss, and neither am I doing that). I thought we started out ok, and didn't do any misstakes this early in the game, but then Maxi Rodriguez got the chance to score, and 1:0 was a fact. It hurted to see such a obvious pass go through to Maxi, who easily put the ball behind Dragoslav Jevric.
The game continued and we started playing well, but then again Argentina took control of the game and after 24 passes in a row, Esteban Cambiasso scored 2:0 for the Argentines, very beautiful. Cambiasso who should've started in my oppinion got the chance after a unlucky Gonzalez who had to be substituted. This is where I knew we had lost, but I would never give up on Serbia & Montenegro so I was still watching the game as if it was a very close one, but it wasn't obviously. Maxi Rodriguez scored another one in the end of the first half, and 3:0 in half time was very much deserved for the Argentines.
We really didn't have anything to play for in the second half more than our honour. But we didn't even defend our honour, Kezman was sent off after a totally unnecessary challenge. I don't know..
Then later on Argentina scored the last three goals of the game, and we lost 6:0 against them.
I'm very dissapointed and had to calm down because of the poor performance. It was shamefull to see our players be played out like this, and this made me think further about some stuff.
Hands down to Argentina, they played beautiful, smart and were effective on their 11 shots.
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nightmare
