The second round of the World Cup was the round in which football, politics and footballing politics smashed together. It started well with Uruguay and South Korea playing out an interesting game and Ghana’s win over the USA being the highlight of what turned out to be a poor round of games. Poor for performances. [...]
The World Cup is inexorable and gives no time for taking a breath. No sooner has the first phase finished and sixteen teams have exited then the seventeenth have left and it is the South Koreans who lose 2-1 to Uruguay and the increasingly impressive Luis Suárez. Uruguay never looked significantly troubled by the Koreans [...]
The third round of games in a World Cup makes decisions. It does it quick – sixteen games in four days – and it does it without pity. The wheat is separated from the chaff and before the first game in the second phase teams will be home, managers will have left and the World [...]
Argentina make seven changes from the team which beat South Korea 4-1 and while many would look to the fact that Lionel Messi is still in the side and Sergio Agüero and Diego Milito have come in and suggest that the South Americans have the talent to beet Otto Rehhagel’s practical Greeks winning the World [...]
The World Cup is the biggest event on the planet and that the pressure has got to some of the players is perhaps understandable. Until Jesus returns – not Navas but the Biblical one – there will be nothing that has so many pairs of eyes on it. That the pressure gets to some players [...]
The popular thinking which tells us that two wins in a group stage will see a team through to the next round – almost correct although it is possible for three nations to end up with six points in a group where one team loses all matches, no team wins all and no team draws [...]
The first round of games has been marked by fear and the results of giving into that fear. If one moment summed up the opening sixteen games it was New Zealander Winston Reid heading home in the last minute against a Slovakia side who feared adding to the one goal they had and were punished [...]
I shall admit to a soft spot for Greek striker Georgios Samaras. Samaras – who comes from the City the airport of which most closely serves the Village my Mother lives in – seemed a great signing for Manchester City when Sven Goran Eriksson picked him up a few years ago and his ranging movement [...]
The best thing about the World Cup is its elusiveness. Try as they might in forty four years England have yet to catch up with the thing again – in a winning sense at least – and they are not alone in this near fruitless quest. The list of countries to have tried and not [...]