Poland is... enough about Poland.

Ecuador played ok, they tried to stay sim­ple, do their thing, make the oth­er team beat them. Which Poland had no in­ter­est in, so Ecuador scored a cou­ple of goals just in case, and hey, they won! Poland is per­haps the worse team so far, and that in­cludes Trinidad and To­ba­go. And Cos­ta Ri­ca.

Eng­land, I have heard, are slow starter­s. I hope for their sake that's the case. Ash­ley Cole has a se­ri­ous case of be­liev­ing he is way more skilled than he needs to be ( I thought Rio Fer­di­nand was the one with that prob­lem?) And any­way, Paraguay start­ed weak, and had huge trou­ble at­tack­ing. So, good win for Eng­land, hope­ful­ly Paraguay was just ner­vous. Gamar­ra is a re­al­ly un­lucky guy.

Swe­den... what a frus­trat­ing match. T&T was play­ing on guts alone, their best for­ward played as a de­fen­sive mid­field­er, and still they had the clear­est shot at goal, out of a pass by the goal­keep­er! Swe­den was just in­cred­i­bly un­luck­y, or their for­wards were blind­fold­ed.

Ivory Coast is a pret­ty good at­tack­ing team. They are a be­low av­er­age de­fense, though, which ex­plains why Ar­genti­na scored twice on three chances, and the oth­er one was saved 90% be­hind the goal.

Savi­o­la played well, Riquelme did­n't. The de­fense... they played waaaay back, and Ab­bon­danzieri sim­ply gave away ev­ery ball he touched with a long kick to an ivo­rian.

But hey, it's a win... no ob­vi­ous trou­ble... need to play with some con­fi­dence... ok, we suck a lit­tle. But it can get bet­ter.

Pala­cio for some rea­son could­n't stand up in the field, was fall­ing when­ev­er he tried to run.

But I think ev­ery­one agrees: the Ivory Coast is a scary team. They are skilled, they are ath­let­ic, they are not too bad­ly or­ga­nized... they can be a chore for any team.

So far, of the "good" team­s... none has looked very good. No can­di­dates to win yet, IMVHO.