Poor North Korea… I’ll put one of the players up at my gaff if someone will pay for his airfare.
Well, 200 years ago Brazil was still part of Portugal, and for a while during the Napoleonic era Brazil was Portugal, so I can understand the confusion.
Finally a commendable European effort in offence. And I’m glad that Portugal has its great game out of its system. 
Yeah, now that we’ve seen the Christiano Ronaldo smirk, I want to see him cry.
Technically, if the defender controls the ball, it does reset the offside, but there’s really no way to consider that a controlled touch in this instance though I’ve seen some valiant efforts to call it so on other boards.
I hope the North Korean players aren’t shot when they get home.
Looks like Portugal are through. Even if they lose to Brazil, there would have to be a couple of 5-0 results to overturn the goal difference.
30 minutes into the Switzerland-Chili game: 4 yellows and a red…
That red was…a little strange. The Swiss player did a whole bunch of stuff that usually wouldn’t warrant a red, and some stuff that wouldn’t even deserve a yellow, but the fact that he did all of it within 15 seconds meant it was time to go.
The four yellows, at least two of which (N’kufo and Ponce) were handed out pretty easily, should have told that Swiss guy that he needed to take it easy, I think.
Waldo Ponce gets my vote as the name of the tournament, anyway.
I dunno. I’ve seen many a player sent off for elbows to the face just like the second one he did. Hell, I saw Dion Dublin sent off for Coventry City once for swinging and missing completely.
Chili goal disallowed, good call! Finally something the refs get right.
OK, my inner pedant has snapped. Can we please stop calling them “Chili”? It’s a country, not a pepper.
A Chile win is a bad result for Spain. They must now win both of their remaining games to guarantee movement to the next round.
And Iniesta seems to be out today.
Teams from countries that are at least partially in the southern hemisphere only have 2 losses - South Africa lost to Mexico and Australia lost to Germany. Just something to think about for your round-of-16 bets.
I hear the water swirls differently down there.
And another referee influences a game far too much. Chile deserved it, Benaglio was excellent again but his back four committed to many mistakes this time to ensure a draw. Looks like an interesting final in this group.
Not even guaranteed if they do win those 2 (if they win them both 1-0, and Switzerland beats Honduras 1-0, then the three will draw lots to see who goes through).
How often do teams finishing with 2 wins and a loss in group play fail to advance to the next round?
I was wondering if it might be possible to have 11 groups of 3 instead of 8 groups of 4, with the winners of each group plus the next 5 highest point totals advancing. Each team would play two matches against the other two teams in its group. I guess the problem with this set-up would be that teams would have to be idle while the other 2 were playing, so you would always end up with one team that’s much more rested than the other side (for better or for worse).
Argentina came third in their group despite winning twice, in the 1994 World Cup in the USA. But in those days there were only 24 teams in the competition, six groups of four, and the four best third-placed teams went through in order to have the necessary 16 teams for the knockout stages. Argentina were easily the best-performing of the third-placed teams.
These situations are rare, but usually happen when one of the teams in the group is a “whipping boy” that everybody beats. If they then beat each other (A beats B,
B beats C, C beats A) you get a 6-6-6-0 distribution of points. The other whipping boy formulation is 5-5-5-0 where three teams beat the other one and then draw with each other.
You can also have “dominant team” formulations where one team gets three wins and then the others draw with each other or beat each other in a triangle.
It’s looking increasingly likely that no African team is going to make it to the next round which is a real pity. After Portugal’s 7-0 drubbing it’s going to be nearly impossible for Ivory Coast to beat them on goal difference. And while Ghana is on top of the group right now, they are out if they lose to Germany and Serbia beats Australia.