he told the BBC Football Daily podcast<\/a>. “There’s no stitching in it – it’s all bonded together. <\/p>\n“When you mix that in with the different weathers, the air density, there’s less drag on the ball, which means it doesn’t spin as much, but it also means I find it a split second faster and I think we’re seeing that a little bit.<\/p>\n
“There’s a couple of goals where you’re seeing keepers getting close to it – Pickford, with the first goal of the Croatia scores – and you’ve got Luca Zidane against (Lionel) Messi and even Edouard Mendy against Mbappe.<\/p>\n
“The thing about this ball is that we want to see goals, so they build balls to score goals.”<\/p>\n
There have certainly been plenty of goals already.<\/p>\n
In fact, there have been twice as many from outside the box (20) than there were during the whole of the group stages in 2022. <\/p>\n
According to Opta, the number of errors leading to goals is also on the up.<\/p>\n
There have been 11 so far in the United States, Canada and Mexico – more than in the group stages in any of the past seven World Cups.<\/p>\n
Although six further games have admittedly been played up to this point, following the tournament’s expansion, it is still a significant increase.<\/p>\n
“How many times at the top level do you see the goalkeeper touch it and it go in the goal?” Hart said.<\/p>\n
“Very rarely because they’re good enough that once they do get contact, they get it wide. <\/p>\n
“I’m noticing in this tournament that goalkeepers are getting touches on it above their shoulder height and they’re just not able to keep it out, so something is up.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kasper Schmeichel thinks so. The former Denmark goalkeeper took no chances and familiarised himself with the Adidas ball long before…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5558,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/racingsport.xyz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}