Well, I don't think I'm going to make any more World Cup predictions. This game did not go how I expected it to go. At all. I missed watching it live as I was at a Chinese restaurant for a team lunch (among the culinary delights that I did not partake in - sea snails and jellyfish). But it was impossible to avoid the score - we had a banquet room upstairs, but there was a big screen downstairs showing the game. A good result for sure, showing some encouraging resilience and some surprising attacking flair (predictably, we are always going to be a threat at set pieces) - but there is an awful long way to go in the tournament, so I am not going to read too much into the performance. In past World Cups, you didn't mind if you started the tournament slowly as you really wanted to peak in the later rounds. But with this stretched out tournament, including an extra knockout round, I don't know if you can really build up that momentum in the same way. But a win is a win, and it does somewhat take the pressure off for the next couple of games - which cannot be a bad thing.
