NIPPON

I know I still need to write the last leg of our "Travel Journal" to Europe. Our trip to Italy was quite an adventurous one. Since the world, at the moment is captured by the Football Fever, I guess, I will leave it at that and keep on focusing on more exciting topic.

What a wild weekend in the World Cup. What a rotten, fantastic game. Rotten in a poor quality match ruined by the referee and the players assaulting, diving, and acting; fantastic in that the Japan can now realistically qualify to get beaten by Brazil. I was very excited Sunday morning for the Japanese and Croatian game. Both Prasanna and I, we wore our Japanese t-shirts and headed to “Phoenix Landing” to watch the game.The place had already started getting crowded. We met some other Japanese and Croatian Fans. The Japanese team really played quite well with the Croatian team. Lots of attacking play and aggressive passing moves from both sides but only had NAKATA or INAMOTO made any goals, the Japanese team would have really had chance to go to the second round.Well now I see a very slim chance.

I guess I just have to satisfy saying that every four years, some succeed where others fail. Some arrive on a neophyte ticket and perform woefully,making it very difficult to return, while others just go for the last time.

Not a great performance, but Brazil have secured qualification. They played well, but they didn’t win; the Aussies lost. Ronaldo was generally ineffective and mistake-prone aside from his game winning assist. Still, a win is a win.

Australia are still two points ahead of Croatia and Japan, and after this impressive performance you wouldn’t bet against them scraping through. It was quite interesting to see Coach HIDDINK, who was the Coach of the Korean team at the 2002 World cup.

What can I say about the third game, An early strike by Arsenal'sThierry Henry finally put an end to France's World Cup goal drought on Sunday but South Korea struck back dramatically to grab a deserved 1-1 draw and stay top of Group G. They have 4 points now.It was also quite interesting to see the Indian man at the French team.

Will Brazil win the World cup title this year? Will Ronaldo give his impeccable performance? I guess at the moment, this is a million dollar question :)