Quarter Finals

I'm trying to muster up the energy to post this. Well, I guess we all saw that coming, that after decrying the conventional wisdom about Spain, I'd get a conventional beating as Spain goes down to France 3-1. I'm sure Spain will find it gauling that after beating Ukraine 4-0 and winning their group, Ukraine gets the easy game against Switzerland and goes to the quarters while Spain has to play France, but if you can't beat this aged French team, I guess you don't deserve to go far.

Meanwhile, the Germans made it look easy against Sweden, Brazil made it look (fairly) easy against Ghana (although I'd say the 3-0 score flattered them a little bit) Argentina and England made it look hard against Mexico and Ecuador respectively, and the aforementioned Swiss got eliminated Italian style, going out of the tournament despite not getting scored upon. They might want to work on penalty-taking sometime in the next 4 years back in Switzerland.

Holland and Portugal played an ugly game with lots of poor sportsmanship from both sides, I think I might actually cheer for England when they play Portugal, or maybe I just won't watch that game.

Finally, Italy pulled one out against Australia in classic Italian fashion, although to be fair, once down to 10 men, many teams would have to sit back on defense and hope for a fortunate penalty.

My predictions were 5 for 8 which is again pretty uninspired, perhaps my worst prediction was that Holland-Portgual would be a good game.

Quarter final predictions:

Argentina over Germany
Portugal over England
Brazil over France (revenge from 1998!)
Italy over Ukraine