Brazil's Robinho

When Spain brought Torres on in attack they looked dangerous, so I would expect him to start the next match.

Unfortunately, South Africa lost 3-0 to Uruguay, which is a shame as we want the host nation to do well and go through to the next round. If South Africa doesn’t go through, it will be the first time ever that a host nation hasn’t gone through. In saying that though, they still have a chance to beat France.

The Ivory Coast and Portugal drew 0-0 which was a bit disappointing for both teams.

The Ivory Coast is the better side and deserved to win, but there just weren’t any real chances for either team, plus the Ivory Coast were disappointing. Didier Drogba came on in the second half though – even with a broken arm. His presence went some way towards inspiring his team, but it just wasn’t enough. On the other side, Christiano Ronaldo was disappointing for Portugal. He hasn’t played well for his country for the last six months.

The match that everyone was looking forward to was between Brazil and The People’s Republic of Korea on Tuesday. Everyone expected Brazil to win by at least five or six goals but the People’s Republic of Korea defended very well and got numbers behind the ball. They kept the game very tight and tried to catch Brazil on the break.

They had a number of half chances for breaks in the first half but their ball seemed to let them down. This made it difficult for Brazil who were lucky to walk away with a 2-1 win. Robinho played well with most of the creative spark coming from him, but Kaka was disappointing.

This is another example of how the so-called weaker teams are playing well and making it hard for the stronger teams to perform. They are fighting hard and not letting the stronger teams walk away with big wins.

One thing I have to mention about this World Cup is the drop in the number of goals being scored. Typically, at this stage of the tournament (up until Wednesday June 16th), there would have been 35 plus goals scored. So far though, there have only been 25.

This in large part is due to the new soccer ball. FIFA has made the ball lighter thinking that it would help score more goals, but it’s had the opposite effect. Free kicks from a long range with a lighter ball are making the ball more difficult to control and they are not hitting the mark, which has resulted in the quality of goals scored not being as high.