And so the English and Portuguese are through

Less said about England the better, as the scrambled home another win thanks to a Beckham free kick. As usual terrific game of free flowing football when England are playing, fast temp with a lot of interchange. Not.

The Portugal-Holland match was quite something else, due to the referee more than anything else. A brilliant 4 red cards and 16 yellows (shame he didn't beat the WC record of yellow cards at 18) issued by the one and only Valentin Ivanov, who looks uncannily like Ryan Stiles, the guy on Whose line is it anyway? The joker refereed Porto v United a couple seasons back at OT, and fell for the cheating scum that were Porto. Of course he and his linesman disallowed a perfectly legal goal from Scholes, which would almost certainly put us through, regardless of the late error by Howard, and the resulting goal by Costinha.

Enough of previous now, but the ref made the game a very funny game to watch, when he gone card happy towards the end it was like a countdown to each card being produced. His consistency was lacking - second yellow to Costinha for handball, yet he failed to give van der Vaart a yellow for the same infringement. Sending off a player just because it's the letter of the law and he committed an offence is retarded, refs should apply common sense so we won't see games fucking abandoned every week, and obviously this lad doesn't have any. He makes Graham Poll look like a saint really. Lost control of the game, and just resorted to pulling out the cards at every opportunity.

Oh well, Portugal reserves v England then, England get another lucky break and sneak through to the semis?