Put away the flags, the party is over...

Thank god for that.

In the dullest sporting competition in the world, one of the dullest competitors is out - its England.

I watched the England v Portugal FIFA World Cup Quarter Final yesterday with the honest belief that it couldn't be as poor and boring a game as the previous round against Ecuador, I was wrong.

Both England and Portugal appear to have been coached from the same manual, that is that football is a game where you keep possession and, erm, well thats it really, you keep possession and the other side can't score goals then.

Score goals ? But shouldn't you be scoring goals too ?

Oh no, you keep possession and if you keep it long enough and if you're very lucky then you might find that someone on your side will manage to score a goal, if not it doesn't really matter because a draw is pretty good too, you get a point for a draw in the league so thats not all bad.

But of course this is knock-out football and you get nowt for a draw in the FIFA World Cup, in fact if you draw at the end of full time then they punish you by making you play another half hour, its a bit like detention at school, you get to stay behind until you get it right.

And then when you still can't score a goal (and you've been playing for 120 minutes now), they make you take penalties until a result is reached, and as every England supporter knows, when it comes to penalties you've lost already, everyone knows that, which makes it all the more puzzling why the players don't seem to want to score a proper goal during the two hours of proper play.

To put it simply, at the end of 120 minutes, if Portugal had left the field, got changed and got on the bus home and left England to continue playing on their own, they still wouldn't have scored a goal by midnight, in fact they might have conceeded an own goal and lost.

The same could also be said of Portugal.


After the game I sat and forced myself to watch another quarter final involving Brazil and France in the belief that there must be something that I'm missing about this football lark, too many people are swept along with the hype for it to be all hype and no substance, there must be something good about the game surely ?

And there it was on the TV right in front of me, Brazil v France was an incredible game of football, played the way that it should be played, two teams who both wanted to score goals to win, here was a game that had no chance of going to extra time, penalties were not on the agenda, whenever either side had the ball they used skill and flair that is not seen in the English game to get the ball up into the other sides half and onwards towards their goal - simply superb stuff and I loved watching it.

So maybe, just maybe this week there will be the chance to see two semi finals that are a tad more interesting than the fare provided so far, although as one of them involves Portugal I won't be holding my breath for too long and maybe we could just end up with a France/Germany final that will kick some backsides in this country.

I doubt it though.

In the meantime the bandwagon-jumpers can put away their silly little car flags and take down their JJB flags from their bedroom windows and we as a nation can stop pretending that we know how to play football and stop pretending that we are anything but quarter finalists.