Woah-oh, we're half-way there. Having fun?
The world cup is 32 games old, another 32 to go. So far we've had fatties, farces, fruitloops and, yes, some fantastic football.
Indeed, some of the most fantastic football. Argentina's thorough vanquishing of most-consecutive-clean-sheet record-holders Serbia & Montenegro was, in all probability, the best single team performance that the people that skived off work to watch it have ever seen. The second goal was so good that when the ball hit the back of the net Betfair broke down under the weight of people getting money on the Argentines to win the whole thing.
Okay, that's not quite true. Brazil are still the favourites, but everyone thinks Argentina will win. Got it? Me neither.
Still, at least salivating over Saviola gives the pundits have something other than England to talk about.
As good as the football has been (from Argentina and elsewhere) there has been a truly heroic level of gibberish spewed out from the mouths of the BBC's and ITV's finest. In the name of decency and for the Greater Good, someone has to inform Mark Lawrenson that he's about as funny as war, Jonathan Pearce that silence can be a beautiful thing and the satanically-tongued Clive Tyldesley that suicide is painless. Mute buttons were invented for this. Articulate ex-footballers may be hard to find, but is this really the best they can do? Really? Samba charmer Leonardo's English is better than theirs. And as his keepy-uppy battle with Ian Wright showed, he's still got more skills than the entire England team.
Anyway, back to the football.
The wildest game of the tournament was Italy vs the USA; the chaos of Kaiserslautern. An own goal, three sendings off, and 90 minutes of tedious reminders why one should never back Italy in the group stages.
America's resilience, shouldn't, we're told be such a shock. The States, despite members of their squad playing in the Nationwide Conference (or thereabouts) are technically the sixth best team in the world. Italy are twelfth. Bah. The FIFA rankings are as dumb as Sepp Blatter, however funny it is seeing Germany ranked nineteenth.
There have been some shocks, however, notably Ghana beating the striker-less Czechs, Trinidad & Tobago holding Sweden and France reverting to the form that saw them fail to score a goal in a world cup outside their own country for a good couple of decades.
If France do end up falling at the first hurdle again, it won't be their fault. It will be the fault of the stars. Just ask Raymond Domenech. So amusing that it's hard to believe it's true, France are led into each game by a man who picks his team according to their star signs and the relative positions of Mercury and Mars.
However, rather than calling for the coach's head, as any right-thinking nation would have done, the people of France appear to merely be using this as a reason to sit about, shrug and weep. Existentially.
Even with all this, Domenech has some competition for stupidest world cup manager. Spain's Luis Aragones is a nasty racist bigot, except he's not of course, because (and he did actually say this) "some of [his] best friends are black" Not any more, Luis, not any more.
Still, Spain seem to be breaking with tradition and actually beating teams that are much, much worse than they are. The woefully inept Saudi Arabia are next up, who, despite having an average of 150 caps each and making up the numbers at every world cup that I can be bothered to remember, don't seem to have learnt how to play yet. If Torres can find the motivation to play well against these clowns, the competition for the golden boot could be all over. They still won't win a penalty shoot-out, though.
Not even against England. Probably. There's a lot to say about England, but none of it is worth it. This is the group stage. England are a lazy, scrappy, fighting team, thus they only tend to scrap and fight a bit harder when they need to. Patience people, patience.
Also taking it easy are Brazil. Some of them (Ronaldo) seem to be taking it a bit too easy. Brazil's fearsome frontman used to intimidate every defender on the planet. Now he just imitates the average fan, except of course that all Brazilian fans are much slimmer and more attractive than he is.
The team does seem to have an admirable arrogance though. Croatia? Australia? Please. How can they be expected to turn it on when John Aloisi's name is on the opposition team sheet?
They could, of course, actually be rubbish; tired and shagged out after a tiring season and too many Bacchic nights out in Berlin. Making a judgement either way is as foolish as guessing what FIFA were thinking when they starting playing with the offside rule. Lethargic or otherwise, Brazil are still a must-watch. And they do still have Ronaldinho. And Adriano. And Kaka. And Robinho. And, well, you get the idea.
Brazil won't be happy unless they take the trophy home, and there's no reason yet to think that they won't.
Being a world cup, other teams are merely happy to be here. Their fans are happy too. It's much harder to take a month off work than it is to take two weeks.
One team that you'd think would fit into that category would be Togo. But you'd be wrong. Simply playing in the world cup isn't good enough for the Togo team, who threatened to go home early in a cash dispute. If they were that bothered, they should've put their wages on themselves to lose 8-0 and gone home happy.
Cheating is the only genuinely easy way to make money on the first round. Gambling is risky at the best of times, but during the world cup group stages it's like paddling in a pool full of piranhas. Crazy nations that warm up by sacrificing chickens and screaming tribal war chants while dancing around voodoo dolls of the referees will always crop up to draw with Spain or Italy, a game after being thumped by some part or other of the former Yugoslavia. This is even more likely with everyone shooting when they get within 40 yards of the goal. These balls are flying in. The goalies are blaming everyone but themselves. But then they would, wouldn't they?
BBC
