What Sven could learn from Australia By MSN’s Matt Ball
Last updated June 13 2006
Day four. Three matches: wins for Australia, Czech Republic and Italy.
Advance Australia unfair
After giving us an open, end-to-end, exciting match neither Australia nor Japan deserved to lose.
Played in the afternoon sun at a good pace throughout (Sven take note) the game was not even marred by Australia’s rather robust tackling, which rightly attracted yellow card after yellow card.
Was Japan’s goal legal? Did the strikers impede goalkeeper Mark Schwarzer? Did Schwarzer elbow one of the strikers and knock himself off balance? Did defender Craig Moore push one of the strikers into the goalkeeper? None of the above. Schwarzer simply made a mistake and the cross sailed over his head into the goal.
Enter Australia coach Guus Hiddink. He is the highly successful and experienced Dutch chap who would have loved to have led England after Sven except the Football Association somehow messed up its recruitment drive.
Not content with getting hot under the collar about the goal and showing some true passion (Sven take note), Hiddink made an attacking substitution that turned the game (Sven take note).
On came Tim Cahill who duly scored twice in five minutes at the end of the game with John Aloisi adding salt into Japanese wounds in injury time. Australia 3-1 Japan. A draw might have been the fair result but football does not work that way.
The Aussies now have a great chance to qualify from the group, well, assuming they do well against Croatia or, er, Brazil.
America lose a soccer match
The Czech Republic look like a class act. Coach Karel Bruckner, a dead ringer for Tony Hart or maybe one of the early Doctor Whos, looked on calmly as his team scored two good goals in the first half and soaked up US pressure. Rosicky added a third, and his second, later in the game.
America’s best effort came from Claudio Reyna who hit the post. Landon Donovan, alleged by some so-called Guides to the World Cup as the team’s star man, did very little apart from dive at a defender’s hip to get him booked. Why exactly does Fifa think America are the world’s fourth best team?
And now a poor joke: Where does Brian McBride buy his kebabs? From Landon Donovan.
Italy 2-0 Ghana
The Italians got the better of Ghana in a good game. The Africans perhaps lacked the cutting edge to reply to Pirlo's 40th minute goal.
They were sunk by Kuffour's feeble back pass late on that Iaquinta ran onto and rolled into an empty net, having nipped round the goalkeeper.
Of course, with all this exciting football going on what did English television reports spend an absurd amount of time on (including during half time of some of the matches above)? Wayne Rooney’s injury. It is healing faster than expected, you know. | 
