I wrote in my first post about the world cup this:

We have a prob­a­ble su­per­star, but he's too young and a lit­tle in­jured. We have a ter­ri­ble goalie, an ag­ing de­fense, a lot of above av­er­age for­ward­s... I say semis, or quar­ter­s. If we get any fur­ther, it will be in the Italy way, not the Mex­i­co way.

When I said the Italy way, I meant as Ar­genti­na ad­vanced in Italy 90: with lots of suf­fer­ing.

Now, this was not even close to the equiv­a­lent match in Italy: re­lent­less­ly be­ing dom­i­nat­ed by Brazil, but boy was it painful.

Not a great match, but I have hope that's just beause we match up bad­ly with Mex­i­co.

Ger­many beat the tar out of Swe­den, and Eng­land has just fin­ished beat­ing Ecuador.

• Ger­­many is good, but I still want to know what hap­pens when they play a team that can ac­­tu­al­­ly score. The clos­est they had was Ecuador, but they played with­­out their best for­ward.

• Swe­­den... what a de­­press­ing team.

• En­g­­land... Like Swe­­den, but with a guy that can do free kick­­s.

• Ecuador... ner­vous. But not a bad game, they could have won if they had de­­cid­ed to bring it to En­g­­land, which should have had some play­er thrown out for re­­peat­ed foul­ing.

• Mex­i­­co... gut­s. Lots of them. Peo­­ple have said Lavolpe is crazy. His name means "the fox". So, yeah, he is crazy... like a fox! He made a per­­fect tac­ti­­cal set­t­ing, but was un­lucky with in­­juries.

• Ar­­gen­ti­­na... we can get bet­ter. I feel there is still an­oth­er gear. But we need it on fri­­day.

And to all my ger­man friends in KDE... good luck, and a pain­less 1-0 de­feat to you! ( just kid­ding ;-)

BTW: this is what hap­pens when Ar­genti­na plays (game start­ed at 16 hours):