Author: BillSaysThis

You’ve seen how the English dance, right? Think mosh pit. Compare that to the grace and control of samba.

In the 70th minute, Brazil makes their first substitution, removing the offense of Ronaldo for an extra defensive midfielder, Edilson. England had subbed in Kieran Dyer for Trevor Sinclair five minutes before.

You wouldn’t think England had the extra man the way the game has gone in the last 15 minutes. They’ve pushed too many long balls too far. Their shots are going high every time. Brazil is defending the corners or England is fouling before the ball comes in to end the opportunity. Time for another sub?

The game is stopped for a minute as Rivaldo recovers from a Sol Campbell finger in the eye. Rivlado is now tied with teammate Ronaldo and German sensation Klose for the tournament lead with five goals, by the way.

And Ronaldinho will miss the next game should his team win.

But wait, Ronaldinho gets a red card!

From the 58th minute, Brazil will be playing with 10 men. Ronaldinho put an elbow across the face of Danny Mills and kicked him as well. Brazilian players are milling around, arguing and it takes the bad boy over 90 seconds to start walking off the field. Is this the break England needs? And does this mean that, if Brazil keeps the lead, that one of their top players will be disqualified for the semifinals?

Holy Crapoli!

Brazil jumps out 2-0 in the 50th minute with a beautiful direct free kick by Ronaldinho from about 32 yards that just lofted in over the head of Seaman, who was caught just a couple of yeards too far off his line! Is Seaman’s back still hurting from that jump in the first half?

Brazil-England: What a 1-1 first half!

No! Rivaldo ties the match off a Ronaldinho run well into injury time. Seaman made a valiant attempt with a dive to his right but the ball was too well placed. Chalk this against Beckham, who had pushed way into the Brazilian half and couldn’t get back to help stop the counterattack. And perhaps the other England defenders who were weary and thinking it was time for the referee’s whistle.

Interesting to me: no cards, yellow or red, in the half and although there have been a reasonable number of fouls I haven’t seen any really rough play. No one acually did anything worthy of a card.

Remember, although teams scoring first in this tournament are 33W-8T-13L, that Brazil went down early against Turkey and still ended up with the win.

English keeper David Seaman makes a great jumping save to shut down a Brazilian offesnive push but he comes down over the top of Sol Campbell and has big trouble getting up. The England trainer comes up and works his lower back before play resumes; that was probably two+ minutes of extra time right there. England is now keeping six men back as a line to make sure they go in at the half with the lead.

But two minutes later, David Beckham is on the goround, holding his right foot, perhaps stubbing his toe defending aginst Ronaldo, not too serious though he has to be carried off for treatment. Beckham is quickly back on and right away takes a hard foul but gets right up. Just to show us his foot is fine, Beckham launches two kick blasts, one blocked and one over the top.

Liverpool bad boy Michael Owen, who did so well against Germany in January, puts the Englanders on the board first with a sweet one on one off his right foot in the 23rd minute!

Tivo vs. ESPN: I better get my games!

Dammit! ESPN has switched which of their networks will show tonight’s World Cup quarterfinal matches from ESPN2 to ESPN. Of course they did this too late for Tivo to update the program guide and make sure I get them recorded. But Tivo must have gotten a lot of heat for this earlier in the tournament since they posted instructions for setting the recordings up manually. Due to Tivo’s stupid use of frames and other inadvised page protection settings, I can’t link to their instruction page; if you need them, go to their home page and click on Customer Support, then the headline/announcement is towards the top of the Support page.

Oh do I hate this!

Go USA!!!

Just something else to blame on America? Or are they big babies?

All the world over, people decry American cultural domination. France, especially, since they make mostly crappy films and music these days. But look at today’s development in Italy: RAI mulls filing lawsuit. Here we have the Italian TV network getting out the lawyers to possibly sue FIFA (the governing body for world soccer) because bad referring lead to the claimed early exit of the Italian team from the World Cup, causing the network to potentially lose serious lira from lower viewership. Are the Italians being overly influenced by America’s overwhelming dependence on lawyers to solve all problems?

FIFA president Sepp Blatter in an interview with an Italian newspaper said that Italy should stop being such bad losers.

And add this to your calculation: the South Korean player who scored the winning goal against Italy has been dropped from the Italian club for which he played because, according to the club’s president, he betrayed Italian football. WTF? Was he supposed to not play his best for his country just because his club is in the country of his opponents?

I think you know the answer.

Users: I feel your pain

“This is driving me insane and making me curse. Why oh why do you have to hurt me like this?”

I am so, so sad that poor little Blogger has done this damage to your psyche! Or is it possible that someone is taking their blog just a little too seriously?

I know, I know! The guy just wants faster service, to move up in the queue ahead of users who filed problem reports before he did, so he’s trying to show us how badly he needs help. Of course, given the backlog and my recent start at tackling it, this particular request was filed three weeks. Somehow the user seemed to get past his insanity and even solve his own problem (probably he just waited it out, a little time seems to cure many Blogger ills) since he’s posted numerous times since then.

Darrell Hammond, where are you when we need your Clinton voiceover talent?

Forgetting history – Howard Feinberg reminds us that 9/11 was not the first act of Arab terrorism on American soil–the first was Sirhan Sirhan’s assassination of Robert Kennedy for his support of Israel 34 years ago!