World Cup Day Six

It hasn't been a good tournament so far for the games I listed as the ten I most wanted to see. USA-Czechs was an ugly blowout, and so was today's Spain-Ukraine game. (The other two of the ten that have already taken place, England-Paraguay and France-Switzerland, were total snoozers.) I guess Spain-Ukraine was good if you like goals, and the fourth was a cracker. On the other hand, maybe that goal doesn't happen if Ukraine aren't reduced to ten men on one of the worst straight reds you'll ever see in your life (to say nothing of the fact that it shouldn't have been a penalty either). This is not to say that Ukraine were ever in the game, because they weren't. They may possibly have played worse in relation to their opponents than did the U.S. in the Czech game. So what set up to be the best game of the day actually ended up being the worst.

I had minimal interest in Saudi Arabia-Tunisia and didn't have the time to watch three full games (though I skipped through much of the second half of Spain-Ukraine for obvious reasons), but I did watch the goals. Considering how unfancied both these teams are in their group, all the goals were pretty nice-looking. Of course, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia were playing Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, respectively. I don't think either has a chance against a Spanish side firing on all cylinders, but one or both could steal a point or more from Ukraine unless the first game really told us that much more about the Spanish than about the Ukrainians. Ukraine does still have to be favored to advance for now, I think, given their performance against a strong qualifying group.

Germany-Poland was the game of the day and one of the best of the tournament so far, even if I'm no particular fan of either team. It basically embodied a lot of what I find so great about soccer - it was a wide-open game with both teams frequently going on the attack, but a lot of good goal-keeping (especially from Boruc, who would have been man of the match had it finished in a draw) kept it scoreless. The double crossbar right before the 90th was insane, and I think most people thought Germany couldn't break through after that... and then they struck. Wouldn't have happened if Poland had had 11, probably, but the foul that drew the second yellow was plenty legit. Tough break for the Poles; after looking bad against Ecuador, they play probably about as well as they can against Germany and still get no points out of it, and now they're going home early again barring a Costa Rica win over Ecuador, a Poland win over Costa Rica, a German win over Ecuador, and a bunch of stuff that fixes the -3 GD Poland currently has. It's not as impossible as it could be, but you hate to have to rely on so specific a sequence of events. Any draws in there and Poland's done, for example, and there hasn't been a World Cup group without a draw since Group H in 1998. So... yeah.

Tomorrow's games: Ecuador-Costa Rica, England-Trinidad, Sweden-Paraguay. I'd say I'm most interested in the middle one. But really it's all building up to the do-or-die U.S. game on Saturday.